Everybody includes those big OTS, Estimated Visitor numbers next to their coverage.
You know the ones.
my guardian coverage:
theguardian.com/my-client-is-going-to-love-this
OTS = 150 million
(using a tool like similarweb to get traffic estimates — http://www.similarweb.com/website/theguardian.com )
How many times has a client laughed in your face for reporting a number like this? I’m guessing they don’t. Which is a problem.
Why don’t we innovate in this space & add some credibility back to these numbers.
How?
150 million is the total estimated visits for the ENTIRE Guardian website for a full month.
So you could reasonably publish this number IF the editor at theguardian.com decided that the article your client was mentioned in was so amazing, they could get away with deleting everything else and build a one pager site website featuring your coverage.
“But I got coverage on the homepage.” you say…
Sorry…
The homepage of the guardian doesn’t get 150 million — that’s the sum estimated number for visits to every page on their website. You can’t claim that.
But you can begin to make educated guesses. The homepage is likely to get something like 30–50% of that total figure.
So 75 million? Well no….
How long did your article stay linked from the homepage? 1 hour? 2 hours? Maybe a day at best? You’ll have to factor that in.
Here’s a rough but more realistic formula:
150 million (total month numbers) Divide that by 50% to get estimate of home-page visits
Divide that by 30 days
= home-page mention gets you 2,5 million.
Still a respectable number right.
We’ve been building models to estimate traffic visits for all this.
Only the brave choose to show estimated coverage views in their reports.
Originally published at coveragebook.com.
