Successes need to be credibly documented

Internet analysts are used to this. But editors like us always look in disbelief at the figures reported to us by our partner "meltwater". The international company calls itself the "preferred partner in the areas of media, social, consumer and sales intelligence who want to make a difference". That's what we've wanted since 2003. We had Meltwater count us for 18 months. They delivered results that left us as writers and editors more surprised than internet marketing experts. We need an alternative view of our work, which is why we have now resumed our collaboration with Landau Media.

Even after the results of the first month with Landau compared to one of the last in the collaboration with Meltwater, the differences between the systems can be seen in the results. In May of this year, Meltwater found 41 media that had used material in Author Union Mobility once or several times. These were almost exclusively Internet media. Landau, with its more DACH-focused view, found 176 media in its warm-up month of May - Internet plus print.

Three interpretations for reach

According to Meltwater, the 41 media outlets have a total reach of 68.4 million. This is the so-called net reach. In the 41 media, Meltwater found 951 pieces of material from the car media portal, the e-media portal, the English version Car-Editors.News and the content hub Car-Editors.Net. The product of the reach of the individual media and the articles published in these media with our content results in a gross reach of 4.45 billion - every month a cause for incredulous amazement at how the experts deal with such measures in view of a world population of around 7.5 billion. But marketing obviously has a special view of reality.

Landau breaks down his 176 results into print - in May, this amounted to a circulation of 3.7 million - and the Internet. For the Internet, Landau cites a reach of 17 million as well as 1.2 billion page impressions and 362.6 million visits. The concept of reach has a different quality for Landau. It is not just the sum of all circulation figures of the customers, but attempts to specify a realistic number of readers for each medium. Landau's gross reach definition with print and Internet leads to the following figures for May: 844 acceptances of material from the editorial offices of the Authors' Union, print circulation 9.4 million, Internet reach 1.3 billion.

Mobile applications dominant

We have learned a lot with Meltwater's analysis tools and have opened up many possibilities for evaluating the results for individual brands or time periods. However, the result that will influence our work the most in the future results from a factor that we had not previously considered. Meltwater differentiates between "desktop reach" and "mobile reach". Up to now, we have only ever recorded what appeared in print or on desktop in our external reporting. Now we know that our monitoring of publications on the web and in print media only accounts for around a fifth of our actual reach. Today, around 80 percent of our reach and that of our partner media is via cell phone applications. We will also take this insight with us for Landau's future evaluations.

May was the first month in which Landau only monitored one of our media, the car media portal. This is not the only reason why there is still room for improvement in future reports. Especially as our other indicators and statistics also show that our approach of focusing on quality is clearly leading to sustainable success. (aum)