I hate to break the news to y’all but the jig is up. Even journalists think impressions today are worthless metrics at best, and dumb and misleading at worst. Never mind what the COO, CFO, and CEO are thinking.
Any reader of this publication should know by now why impressions, especially inflated measures of them, are a terrible metric:
- They make PR people look stupid;
- They probably don’t do anything useful;
- They are misleading; and, if you need one more reason,
- People will make fun of you.
James Dator isn’t even a PR or measurement guy (although, given his last name, he really should be one). He’s a sports writer who works on SBNation.com’s social team. One of his recent posts poked fun at the absurdity of the claim by Washington’s NFL team that 58 million unique individuals actually clicked on a random story on their website.
Imagine if you somehow got every single human who lives in New York, Beijing, and San Paolo to click on your website. That would be 58 million clicks. Put another way, that number is higher than Vanity Fair’s traffic the day after its Caitlyn Jenner exclusive. As this story put it, that click count is not just impossible…“it’s HILARIOUSLY impossible.”
What’s even more incomprehensible is the explanation from Meltwater, from whence the number came. Their spokesperson, Riana Dadlani, Corporate Communications Expert, tried ineffectually to define impressions as: “Anytime a person is exposed to a news story about the event.” Sorry, Riana, but exposure and impressions are not the same thing. Potential exposure—maybe—based on a lot of wishful thinking.
But wait, its gets worse. Turns out that the football team is assuming that every single one of its 1.8 million Facebook fans and all 452,000 Twitter followers also read the story. Even Facebook’s CMO, in his speech to the PRSA International Conference, admitted that less than 3% of what is on Facebook is actually read.
And then it got even worse…
In a further attempt to hype its great PR in a time when most news outlets won’t even mention the name of the team, Washington’s NFL team issued yet another statement that boasted that essentially everyone on the planet had seen the riveting news from their training camp. Spokesperson Dadlani explains it thus: “This seems to be a mix of two metrics we use: unique visitors and impressions. The correct description and definition of the number in question should have been: 7,845,460,401 impressions of print/online coverage of the 2014 Bon Secours Washington Redskins Training Camp from July 24-Aug. 12. As Dator correctly points out, that is more than the population of our planet.
The correct explanation is that they get their reach numbers from ComScore and then Meltwater multiplies that number by however many stories appear in that media outlet or on that website. So eight posts on Yahoo (which ComScore says gets 120 million unique impressions) would generate a billion impressions.
One big problem here is that a potential view of a post does not mean that anyone is going to read it, never mind be aware of that content. Just think: How many sites do you glance at a day and how much of the content do you remember an hour later? Less than 1%, 3%? I can’t remember.
And, that’s the problem, we have no way of knowing whether it’s .01% or 10%. Which is just one more reason why counting impressions is a really bad idea. ∞
