Category: Technology PR

Categories
Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Exclusive! 4 step process for PRs to gain backlink building expertise in 30 mins. Guaranteed!

Kelvin Newman of Brighton-based SEO firm Site Visibility posted a great piece on EConsultancy recently in which he claimed that PRs can be better link builders than SEOs.

Of course, the important word in the title to his blog post is “can”. The implication being that PRs currently aren’t better link builders.

On the back of this, I have spent a lot of effort over the last few weeks to come up with the following foolproof process for PRs who feel they are lacking in their backlink building skills and want to get one up on the competition:

Step One: Click this link
Step Two: Spend 30 mins to one hour reading the articles here.
Step Three: Go back and read them again
Step Four: Remember what you’ve read before embarking on any kind of link building exercise.

Seriously though. Eric Ward talks a lot of sense.  He’s been banging the “great backlink building is synonymous with good PR” drum for longer than anybody.

Pick any one of his articles, and you’ll usually find a pearl of wisdom eg:

It is not the link itself that the engines trust. It is the person behind the link.

The ultimate credibility of the content will be determined, from a linking standpoint, by the credibility of those giving out the links.

Web marketers should not ignore the significant role this human algorithm will play in their link building future.

There seems to be a growing consensus that relationship building and content are the keys to successful backlink building (and by definition, successful PR and SEO). If so, then the door remains firmly ajar for the PR sector. However, it needs to make the effort to grasp the opportunity.

Categories
Digital marketing digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR

Why poor backlink requests are like bad PR Pitches

The SEO vs PR debate continues to rumble on. However, on a very tactical level, it occurred to me that certain SEO practitioners are starting to emulate some of PR’s worst habits – specifically, the bad pitch. Or at least it’s SEO equivalent – the poor Backlink Request.

The key qualities they share are irrelevance and lack of personalisation.

Journalists hate getting mass-mailed irrelevant junk. And in a similar way, if you run a website or a blog (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of us these days), it is just as annoying to get spammy link requests.

I’ve yet to receive a carefully crafted and personalised request for a backlink that shows the person making the request understands what my blog or sites are all about. Or what real benefit might accrue.

It was thus interesting to see Stefan Hull from top SEO firm PropellerNet at the Social Media Marketing event back in June present a case study on the work they’d done to support the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush. A key part of the project was getting quality backlinks. And how did they go about this? By properly researching appropriate backlink properties and then making personalised approaches to try and get the link.

In other words, the kind of work that PRs have been doing for decades with journalists. Substitute editorial coverage for backlink and you get the idea.

This seems to me an eminently transferable skill – and at least for once this is something where PR can bring something new to the SEO party rather than the other way round. I realise some people might think getting a backlink doesn’t have same appeal as getting editorial coverage – but given that SEO firms seem to be better at making money than PR agencies, perhaps one can’t be too sniffy these days.

Categories
Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Reach versus engagement: the new online battleground for PR and media

For decades, PR has been seen by many marketeers as “cheap reach via editorial” – in other words, the goal of PR was to gain editorial coverage that provided the greatest number of opportunities to see – at a significantly lower cost than advertising.

Because the means of providing a verifiable link between editorial coverage and business impact was either prohibitively expensive or just not possible, there has been a largely accepted assumption that positive press coverage is valuable – period.

In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical.  Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement (if a newspaper has a readership of 2 million, then we assume that a large proportion must be in some way engaged with some or all of the content – we just aren’t sure which content and to what degree. Or whether this engagement results in a meaningful business outcome).

However, you could argue that Google data now provides for a much deeper understanding of editorial engagement. At least online.

For example, by using the Google search “site” command, you can easily see how many pages of a site the search giant has indexed (ie are likely to be found).  And with Google’s Doubleclick Ad Planner tool, you can get a fix on a specific engagement metric – namely, time spent on page. The more time someone spends reading content, the more likely they are to be engaged with – and influenced by – that content (of course, it could mean that people are having difficulty understanding the content – but if that extended to all of a site’s content, you would presume its readership figures would tail off rapidly).

In conjunction with Adam Parker, Chief Executive of RealWire, the online press release distribution service, we took it upon ourselves to analyse a selection of 50 online, newspapers and magazines, examining three core areas:  readership, engagement and UK relevance of content. Adam provides an excellent analysis of the results on his blog, Show Me Numbers.

So what kind of engagement do people have with leading online news sources? (*Full detail and slide presentation of  joint Realwire/Escherman analysis here).

For example, the average UK visitor to The Economist site spends around 122 seconds per page. While the average UK visitor to the Reuters site spends around 214 seconds per page.

So what does a difference of 92 seconds per page mean? If you accept that a typical reader can consume around 200 words of content per minute then in principle, a Reuters UK visitor is going to consume around 713 words vs 406 words for The Economist – in other words, a Reuters visitor is going to consume nearly 75pc more content than the typical Economist reader.

If you look at the average number of pages consumed per visit, there are some interesting things to be drawn out. Across the whole sample, the average number of pages consumed per visit – either globally or in the UK – is around 4.  And if the average number of visits per month per visitor to a site is around 3, then the total number of pages consumed per month by a typical visitor is around 12 pages of content. Clearly, some site’s visitors will come back more often than others. But the likelihood that the majority of news site visitors will consume more than 20 pages of content in a month is low.

However, before Avanash Kaushik beats me up, I’ll be the first to say that all averages lie – and this analysis rests upon averages. Having said that, it doesn’t mean that this is a useless exercise. If the average engagement time per page is 60 seconds, that almost certainly means that some people spend longer reading a page, while others spend less time. By definition, the number of people spending longer reading a page is going to be less than those spending a shorter time than average. Which means that the vast majority of people visiting an online news site are engaging less with the content than the average. The same applies for average views per URL. Some URLs are going to get more views than the average (clearly a big story is going to get significantly more than the average). This means that the majority of URLs are going to be viewed less than than average. Which means an 80/20 principle applies – namely, a minority of a news site’s content, is going to get the majority of the engagement.

The implications for PR are clear. Getting positive client messages into the first few hundred words of a piece is going to be nigh on essential for sites with lower average page visit times – otherwise, the likelihood is that your message just won’t be seen by many of a news site’s readers – all in spite of the effort you put in to get a journalist to write about your client in the first place. Having said that, as a general rule, specialist titles seem to have lower numbers of visitors and page views, but tend to have far higher engagement with content. And what of offline media? In spite of dwindling circulations, a case could be made for the fact that engagement time with a print newspaper may well be much longer than that of an equivalent site visit – and thus the chance to be exposed to more content is higher (then again, the average shelf life of a daily national newspaper is a few hours. At least web content is in theory available continuously – assuming of course that Google indexes it).

Looked at another way, if you are really interested in maximising engagement with a client’s message (as opposed to maximising its theoretical reach), then this kind of analysis may well help you clearly delineate where the ability to genuinely create a causal impact may lie.

Engagement or reach – what will you be advising your clients to focus on?

Categories
Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Pogoplug allows printing from iPhone, iPad, Android or any other device, no matter where you are

Here’s an interesting new development from Pogoplug (a client) –  web printing. Or cloud printing if you prefer.

For the first time, Pogoplug users will be able to print from an iPhone, iPad, Android or other mobile device from anywhere in the world.

Pogoplug cloud printing will initially support all HP printer models and all Epson printers released since 2005.  Set-up is simple and straightforward; once a printer is connected to a Pogoplug, it is ready to use.

Additionally, users can email any document directly to their Pogoplug for printing.  Printers can be shared with friends, family and colleagues or used to create printer ‘hotspots’ for temporary access to a printer in a public location. The new Pogoplug “cloud printing” feature is coming automatically to existing and future Pogoplug customers later this Summer. And there are no fees for the new feature.

This follows on from another recent addition to the Pogoplug which was the ability to email any document for storage on a Pogoplug connected drive.

As the owner of a shiny new iPad, the Pogoplug is certainly helping to address complaints from some quarters about the rigamarole you have to go through to get files off your iPad to then work on a separate machine. For example, if you create a Keynote presentation,  you have to use some kind of file sharing software to export – and that means being in the vicinity of your desktop machine.

However, with a Pogoplug, you can simply e-mail your presentation (or any file) using “upload@mypogoplug” and you have access to your file from anywhere. For example,  I created a presentation on my iPad while  travelling – when I wanted someone in the office to edit it, I simply e-mailed it to a shared folder – and my colleague could work on it.

Neat.

Categories
Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

How UK PR firms can improve their SEO capability overnight for £85

About 18 months ago*, I paid around £85 for a piece of software called Market Samurai. I can hand on heart say it is has been one of the most valuable tech investments I’ve made in that time.

To describe it as a general internet marketing tool doesn’t really do it justice. Whether it is drastically reducing the amount of time to handle keyword research or detailed analysis of SERPs, I constantly refer to it.

One of things that stands out for me is the vast amount of useful training material provided by the Market Samurai team – for free. Just watching a few of these videos would probably save PR firms many man weeks and hundreds of pounds of Mickey Mouse training from less reliable sources.

Here’s a couple to give you a flavour:

An Introduction To Keyword Research

How To Find Relevant Keywords

Before I get too fluffy bunny about Market Samurai, it isn’t going to do your SEO PR for you. But at least you can try out the product for free for a few weeks, so no risk there.

Anyway. Enough of my gushing. It is most unlike me. Why not click on the big graphic on the upper right of the page and get a free trial download. See what you think. In fact, I’d welcome feedback from people who try it out – I’m happy to share tips and tricks I’ve picked up using the product over the last 18 month with like minded PR folk who want to improve their SEO skills.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpOLMYlO2XE&feature=player_embedded]

*In the interests of transparency, I’m happy to say that I’ve signed up as an affiliate for Market Samurai. So yes, if you do end up buying it, I get a modest commission. It doesn’t impact the price you pay for it. However, you will note that I have no other such affiliate arrangements with any other provider. I’ve been recommending Market Samurai (for free) to anyone who will care to listen over the last year. So the recent creation of the affiliate programme simply gives recommenders like me a small reward for pointing people to a product I highly value in any case.

Categories
Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

Winners and losers in NMA’s search agency league table 2010 + PR implications

A curate’s egg – ie good in parts – is probably the best way to look at NMA’s latest league table of UK search marketing agencies.

As ever, I’m always grateful to NMA for providing the baseline data to look at. As I’ve done in previous years, I thought I’d dig behind the figures to see if there are any significant trends to be discovered – and to compare the search sector with the PR sector.

First up, some things worth noting regarding this year’s league table compared to 2009.

1. As per last year, NMA looked at net income (gross profit) rather than turnover in order to rank agencies.

2. The NMA table seems to suffer like PR Week’s league tables from agencies who submit figures when times are good – and then don’t submit when the data doesn’t look so rosy. There are only 19 firms in this year’s league table that were in last year’s. Hard to believe that 11 firms dropped out by recording a lower gross profit  (£36K) than number 36 ranked iVantage. So we can only assume they chose not to take part for whatever reason.

3. The financial periods being compared vary widely. For example, although in principle the table is intended to cover 2009, iCrossing achieved a number two position based on their figures to the end of Dec 2008. However, Steak returned figures based on a year end to February 2010 – as we all know, a lot can happen in 14 months. So worth bearing in mind that apples aren’t necessarily being compared with apples here.

So what can be gleaned from this year’s figures?

On one level, you might argue that Bigmouthmedia should be very pleased to have held on to their number one slot for the second year running with gross profit of £12.6m (in terms of PR sector comparisons, bear in mind that this is larger than most top 150 PR Week firms achieve in terms of top line fee income).  However, Bigmouth actually saw gross profit drop by 5.78pc on last year – or £775K.  Other firms also saw declines in net income – in fact a total of 42pc of the firms that appeared in last year’s table saw falls in net income. The biggest came from Latitude with a 52pc drop (£5.4m). As was well documented at the time, Latitude went (briefly) into administration in January, before a management buy out saw the firm back in the game.

In terms of net income per earner, Bigmouth once again are  top of the pile – £120K gross profit per employee – marginally down on last year’s figure of £123K. Last year’s top performer in terms of gross profit per employee – Net Planet Media – didn’t figure in this year’s table. Then again, it did derive 100pc of its income via paid search – so perhaps the removal of Google’s BPF had a big impact on net income (for PR comparison, the top fee per earner rate in the PR Week Top 150 is around 280K. However, even assuming stellar gross margins of 30pc ie unlikely, the best performing top 150 PR Week firms would still be well below Bigmouth’s profit per employee figure).

But who were the best search agency performers? (*)

On the basis of actual and percentage growth, then there is a clear winner – Propellernet.  The Brighton-based firm saw net income rise by 64pc to £2.268m. Propellernet was also second only to Bigmouth in terms of gross profit per employee (£113K). Congrats also to Agenda21 and Epiphany Solutions who saw net income rise 44pc and 32pc respectively.

So what does this tell us about the state of the search sector? And the implications for PR?

As NMA themselves pointed out “it was the first full year to cope without Google’s Best Practice Funding. This had often been used by agencies to lure in new business by offering any commission from Google to the client directly. In a world without this, agencies had to prove their added value.”

In other words, agencies had to move away from relying on PPC for income.  This can clearly be seen in the breakdown of individual revenue streams from agencies.

For example, back in 2008, Steak said it drew 80pc of its revenue from paid search. According to NMA, that percentage is now down to 37pc.  And this trend is being played out among other search marketing firms. But although natural search is taking a bigger slice of search agency revenue, in many cases, agencies are turning into digital generalists, offering e-mail, mobile, interactive and other services.

Of course, we ought to be careful about how these labels are defined. For example, top performer Propellernet says 70pc of its revenue comes from natural search with 30pc from paid search. However, Propellernet have been very vocal of late in promoting their SEO PR offering – indeed, they currently describe themselves as a search and social marketing agency. Perhaps some very healthy online PR related revenues are being wrapped up under the label of natural search?

Staying with PR, it was also interesting to note that the digital arm of PR group Golley Slater made an impressive debut in the NMA table with net income of £2.1m. In the PR Week top 150 table, Golley Slater generated PR fee income of £3.9m. Even if Golley Slater achieved record breaking gross PR profit margins of 30pc, then their digital income would still dwarf their profits from PR.  I strongly suspect their PR margins are much lower than 30pc. And PR fee income fell last year.

The search arm of PR group Chime Communications VCCP also saw net income rise to £1.16m – a smaller, but significant and growing contribution to the profitability of Chime overall.

In summary, this year’s NMA league table shows that even the search sector is not entirely immune to the general woes of the economy. Having said that, search firms continue to generate very respectable profits – certainly compared with the PR sector. And search firms are making no secret of continuing their land grab for PR work. The PR sector must therefore continue to up its game in terms of the quality and value of the digital services it offers.

(*) I was all set to name Summit Media as the best performer. They apparently recorded an incredible 1128pc increase (£1.364m) in net income based on the figures in last year’s NMA table which ranked them at number 29 with gross profit of £120K. However, according to this year’s table, they actually recorded net income of £1,208,160 in 2009 – so obviously a big typo remains in last year’s NMA search agency table.

Categories
Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

What PPC ad spending can tell you about the UK PR sector and other digital tales

As part of a recent SEO analysis of the websites of PR Week’s Top 150 agencies (*), we found that only 37pc of them contained the keyword term “PR” in their home page titles. And barely 15pc used the term “public relations” (a fairly bog standard SEO technique).

We then realised that many firms referred to themselves as communications agencies and/or consultancies. So perhaps they were optimising on these terms?

Nope. A mere six agencies had either of these terms in their page titles.
You might argue that PR firms are using other terms to optimise around. But it doesn’t take much analysis to realise that most PR Week top 150 agency websites pay little or no attention to SEO.
But do they need to optimise their sites? Perhaps they will rank highly on Google in any case for standard industry keyword terms?
At first blush, this looks plausible. For example, for the term “communications consultancy”, Hanover, FD and Freud occupy the top 3 slots. And the term is searched for 29 times per day in the UK on a broad match basis.
But perhaps, these PR firms (and others) are missing a trick?
For example, on the term “communications agency”, no single top 150 PR firm ranks in the top 10. And with the term being searched for 217 times a day in the UK on a broad match basis, that is a lot of potential click throughs (and business) going elsewhere.
But are agencies making up for lack of natural search rankings by using Pay Per Click advertising?
Again, no. We estimate that around 60 companies spent money on Google Adwords around the term “communications agency” in the last 12 months. But not one of them was a top 150 PR firm. The same applied for the term “communications consultancy”. (Even those firms that are using PPC seem to be doing so in a fairly crude manner – they don’t test different ad copy and rarely provide a dedicated landing page).
So what does this all mean? Are top 150 PR firms failing to invest in their own SEO and PPC approaches because they don’t know how to do it? Or because they don’t think it is worth the effort?
Or does it say more about the clients who buy PR services? In other words, PR firms are sticking to non-SEO/PPC business development because they’ve tested it and found that this isn’t the way that their prospects decide how to choose a firm?
Perhaps. But even if this were the case, surely client side PR buyers are still looking to PR firms to give them genuine digital communication insight.
According to a joint PR Week/Brands2Life survey from December 2009, 54pc of communications directors think that their key challenge for 2010 is executing a digital strategy. On the agency side, you’d be hard pushed to find one that doesn’t tout its digital capabilities. For example, the following, taken from a top 150 PR agency site, is typical of what you will find in most PR firm’s marketing collateral:
“Search engine rankings are key to increasing the reach and visibility of your activities online. We optimise content across a range of formats for search engine visibility, from press releases to video content. We also ensure any new campaign is designed with natural search results factored in, to ensure that the right content is ranked and easily accessible.”
In which case, what are clients to make of the fact that most of the content on top 150 PR web sites is patently unoptimised. Or betrays a lack of understanding of other elements of the digital marketing mix such as PPC?
If the PR sector is to take a lead on digital communications, it needs to provide better evidence it can provide clients with the most rounded advice on executing a digital strategy. Its own backyard might be a good place to start.
(*) I’ll happily email the full SEO analysis of the PR Week top 150 to anyone who asks me. Nicely.
Categories
Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

An alternative look at the PR Week Top 150 League Table

PR Week published its annual top 150 rankings of UK PR firms a few weeks ago. Adam Parker at Realwire has already produced a good analysis of the figures. I thought I’d throw in some further analysis to try and draw a clearer picture of the state of the UK PR industry.
First, some top line figures. Based on PR Week’s league table, the top 150 UK PR agencies in 2009:
Generated £814 million in fee revenues
Employed 7790 people
Worked on 5683 client accounts and 7154 client projects
Had an average monthly client PR retainer of £6K

In terms of this last figure (and others), I used a rule of thumb that says 80pc of agency fees come from retainer work and 20pc from projects. Clearly this will not apply across the board. Indeed, given the economic climate of the last year, it could be argued that project work should occupy a higher share of total revenue, And looking at the number of projects that some agencies worked on, it would seem that perhaps even the majority of fee revenue came from projects.
Taking all of that into consideration, the 80/20 split at least provides a starting point for analysis.
On that basis, we arrive at an average monthly client retainer fee of £8K. However, it is worth qualifying this. First, given my rule of thumb, one agency skews the results hugely. According to the PR Week league table, Axon Communications only has one client – but on my ROT, this would provide an average PR retainer of around £179K per month. If we remove Axon from the list, then the average monthly retainer drops to £6K per month.
Next, let’s look at some other performance metrics.
1. Fees per earner
Fees per earner has been a standard metric for evaluating the relative performance of PR firms for decades. Looking at the PR Week figures for 2009, the fee per earner leader board clearly shows that financial PR is the place to be:
Agency Fees per earner (£000s)
Brunswick 280
Finsbury 280
Maitland 280
WCG 235
Financial Dynamics 190
Buchanan 190
Gavin Anderson 190
Citigate Dewe Rogerson 171
Bell Pottinger Group* 159
Galliard Healthcare Communications 157
WCG is an anomaly (see below).
Of course, profit per earner would be an even better metric, but short of trawling Companies House for the data, the fee per earner ratio is the one that must suffice for the moment.
Here is the bottom of the fee per earner table:
Agency Fees per earner (£000s)
Iris PR 50
Wolfstar 50
Bellenden 50
Luchford APM 50
Quantum Public Relations 45
GyroHSR/ Woolley Pau PR 41
Radio Relations 40
Finn Communications 29
Kenyon Fraser 28
ICE 22
Some immediate caveats. In a number of cases, PR fees represent only a proportion of total turnover ie the firm makes money from non-PR fee related activity and the staff numbers refer to the business as a whole. So the fee per PR earner ratio is clearly higher. (However, it does beg the question as to what percentage of total turnover devoted to PR should qualify a firm for entry into the league table).
Also, a number of these lower fee per earner agencies are based outside of London – so may argue that a lower cost base allows them a lower than average fee per earner ratio.
2. Ratio of staff to clients/projects
This metric takes the total number of clients and projects an agency works on and divides through by the total number of staff. In theory, it should give an indication as to the average number of clients and projects that each agency employee has to deal with. Again, this comes with a number of caveats. Clearly project type, length and budget will vary enormously from agency to agency. Having said that, it is at least an attempt to provide some kind of indicator on agency workload. Combined with fee revenue, it gives a picture of which firms may be performing better than others.
Agency Client/project staff ratio Change in fee revs 09/08
WCG 33.33
TVC Group 14.41 -8
Radio Relations 11.25 2
Grayling Communications 6.87 -22
PPS Group 6.71 -31
The Reptile Group* 6.27 -7
The Outside Organisation 6. 2
FWD 5.50 -10
The PR Office 4.8 0
Myriad Public Relations 4. -3
Again, WCG should be treated as an extreme outlier. One thing to note though is that nearly all of the agencies with high client/project to staff ratios saw revenue drops.
Odd curiosities

WCG
WCG (rank 138) employees only 3 staff according to PR Week – which leads to some anomalous results. Namely, its fee per earner figure is 235K. It also means it has the highest client/project to employee ratio of 33.33.
Grayling
Grayling stands out for the huge number of client projects it worked on in 2009: a total of 965. Coupled with retainer clients of 430, that’s a total of 1395 clients and projects. Based on my rule of thumb, the average Grayling client is paying around £2K per month. If they are paying more than this, then the average Grayling project is going to be around £1 – 2K.
Axon Communications
According to the PR Week table, Axon only has one client – but generates fee revenue of £2.6 million. Even allowing for the fact that project work may represent a larger than average share of revenue (41 projects), that still suggests that one client represents a large slug of revenue.In my opinion an Cheap Ambien excellent medicine, in order to fall asleep in the evening and normally wake up in the morning.
This is only a cursory analysis. As ever, I’m always grateful to PR Week for producing the baseline figures. I’ve no doubt that further insight can be gained into the health of the sector and individual firms with more scrutiny.
Categories
Digital marketing digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Are PR people the main readers of UK online IT news publications? Google thinks so.

Google has just updated its Doubleclick Ad Planner tool with a useful new feature that shows a site’s top 10 audience interests, representing the aggregate interests of the site’s visitors.
As Google says: “In these top 10 lists, each interest is assigned an affinity score, such as 3.9x, which means visitors to the site are that many more times likely to be interested in the topic than the average Internet population.”
I tried it out on a couple of UK online IT news sites – computerweekly.com and v3.co.uk.
For the former title, public relations was the 2nd top audience interest for UK visitors, with an affinity score of 33.3x.  For V3.co.uk, PR was the top audience interest with an affinity score of 30.1x. In other words, the average UK visitor to computerweekly.com/v3.co.uk is 33.3/30.1 times more likely to be interested in public relations than the average Internet user.
Which is curious. Who knew that UK IT folk were so interested in PR. Or could it be that a sizeable proportion of UK visitors to these online IT news sites are in fact PR people (presumably checking to see if they’ve got any client coverage).
I realise this is only a sample of two, but I’m curious to see if this is a common phenomenon across the online IT publication sector as a whole – at least in the UK.
Categories
Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

What engagement time tells you about the value or otherwise of online press coverage

Consider the following:
1. An average person can read around 200 words per minute on screen.
2. The average UK Guardian website reader spends around 7 mins and 30 seconds per visit (according to Google)
3. The Guardian has monthly page views of around 88 million in the UK and around 21 million unique visitors per month (according to Google)
4. Based on the above, the average visitor will spend around 450/4.2 = 107 seconds per page. In other words, the average reader will read up to 350 words before moving on to another page or off the site completely.
What might we infer from this?
1. Any article longer than 350 words will not be read in full. Not least because on any given page, the reader is also potentially being distracted from reading editorial copy by ads and other elements on the page. In which case, what density of client reference is required within 350 words to have any material impact on the reader?
Is 107 seconds really long enough to make any impact at all?
What about press releases?
Based on Google Ad Planner figures, the average amount of time spent on a page on Sourcewire.com (a well known press release distribution service) = 151 seconds.
Based on an average reading speed of 3.33 words per second, then your typical Sourcewire visitor (ie a journalist) is going to consume, at best, 500 words per page.
However, based on an admittedly small sample, the average Sourcewire press release contains 800 – 900 words.
In which case, you might argue that putting a release on Sourcewire of more than 500 words is a waste of time because the likelihood that a journalist will read more than 500 words per page is very slim (ignoring the SEO value that you might gain from using Sourcewire).
Caveats
These are average figures (Avanash Kaushik would roast me alive). Some people may be able to read more quickly on screen. Then again, many people will read more slowly. And clearly some people may spend more time with content. However, that means that an even greater number spend less time. In fact, that probably is the case if the Newspaper Marketing Society’s figures are true (that 56pc of all UK newspaper web site visits last less than one minute).
Google’s figures may be wildly inaccurate too. That was certainly the claim from publishers when Double Click Ad Planner was first launched. However, you don’t hear so much complaint about them now.
Conclusion
Online PR planning needs to take account of engagement in determining what media sites to target and the appropriate content to provide. If a site’s visitors spend barely 30 seconds on reading a page, then crowing to the client that they’ve got 14 paragraphs of coverage at the end of a 3,000 word article is pretty meaningless – whether it is the BBC or the Wheel Tappers & Shunters Weekly.