How to measure a blogger event using a variation of CPM and quality index

CPM has been used as an industry standard for quite some time to enable brands to understand their cost per thousand impressions on a given site. The range of expense for CPM varies greatly depending obviously on the quantity as well as on how you measure quality of your impression. Recently we finished an engagement with a client of ours looking to understand the return on investment for hosting a blogger event tied to one of their sponsorship platforms. It was a great exercise and it taught the group at large a lot about the various attributes that can go into a measurement approach. So here’s a quick snapshot of the approach as well as what phase II is shaping up to be:

Background: Weekend event, 20 bloggers, free reign to speak their minds

Tools Used to measure: Radian6, Techrigy, Alexa rankings, Compete scores, Google Alerts (RSS feeds), Tweet Search, and a couple of our own “secret sauce” tools

Approach: Develop a dashboard and knowledge management platform for each stakeholder which would compile key metrics and data points into a usable format to provide relevant intelligence on the success/failure of the project

Key Metrics:

Bloggers: sentiment, social channel followers (Twitter, FB, Blog), monthly impressions, actual posts, tone of posts

Brand: Share of discussion (# of mentions +/- and neutral) for week of and following, competitive discussions, social channel performance (FB, Twitter, YouTube) by fan base and commentary

Executive summary: Total impressions by channel, total mentions, tone of mention, total share of conversation bench-marked against previous weeks performance as well as competition, and most importantly, the ability for the bloggers to actually fuel and continue on discussions with their base.

Phase II – Phase II really started with the last point I mention in the executive summary. The ability to understand and measure the influence blogger’s ability to open and maintain dialogues with their fan base. This is an area that moves past the traditional CPM and really gets at the heart of a quality and return of a discussion (challenge of measuring the value of a two way discussion).

Here’s my latest approach in translating quality into impressions. I’ve structured it this way to try to reverse engineer an approach that allows my client to still communicate using the CPM terminology and provides more clarity in defining a baseline for future events. This is an on-going process… I’m open for dialogue here.

(Sum of Quality Score Multiples/Number of Comments) = Average Multiplier; Average Multiplier X Total Number of Web Impressions = Total Quality Impressions (still can be used in the traditional CPM model then)

Comment Quality score is measured as an index. Range of 0-5.

0 score gets a .75 multiple = negative comment (1 negative comment would equal an impression of .75)

1 score gets a 1 multiple = comment is minimal but positive response

2 score gets a 1.05 multiple = comment is information neutral to positive with industry mention however no brand mention

3 score gets a 1.1 multiple = comment includes a question related to industry

4 score gets a 1.2 multiple = comment includes reader expressing a positive attitude towards industry without brand specific mention

5 score gets a 1.25 multiple = comment includes a positive response directly related to the brand of their products or the reader expresses information in trying their product or the reader “reblogs” the post

In summary, positive conversations surrounding a brand would increase the total number of “impressions” considered for the CPM calculation and ultimately provide a better understanding of value.

In the case of the event we were managing, we found that we were able to attribute additional impressions and bring down the CPM slightly (still high – ranging from $300-$700). Considering the niche reach of the outlets, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Brian Steketee