Estimated views in a nutshell
The Estimated Views metric is a page-level estimation of how many people will read a piece of coverage in its lifetime. Its a close equivalent to counting ad impressions on a specific page.
Estimated coverage views are an estimation of how many times your coverage on a specific page may have been viewed.
Very much like counting ad impressions on a specific page.
You can read more about this metric here https://coveragebook.com/for/credible-reach-numbers/
Say for instance you are one of the brands mentioned here. If we look at SimilarWeb's sitewide traffic, it predicts that 301 million visit the Guardian a month.
But that’s not how many people will see that piece of coverage. The site covers everything from breaking news to sports, culture and lifestyle. It would be unrealistic to say that everyone who went to check on the latest football scores or the latest news stayed to read every last piece.
While sitewide metrics can be useful for understanding how popular a site is, they are not a realistic view of how many people will read your coverage.
So we use a more realistic figure - Estimated Views.
How are Estimated Views calculated for online coverage?
Estimated Views are a proprietary algorithm from CoverageBook and factors in…
The traffic to the site - sitewide data is still a major factor - the more traffic the site has, the more people are likely to see your coverage. As well as traffic, we also look at followers and subscribers to that outlet.
How many pages on the site - if a website has only a few pages, a higher percentage of the overall traffic will see your page. But if a website has thousands of pages, a lower percentage of the traffic would likely see each specific page
If the article is on the homepage or deeper in the site - If the coverage was on the homepage it will receive more of the overall traffic but if it’s hidden deeper, fewer people are likely to find it
How many times a piece has been shared and related engagement rates - If the piece has been shared a lot on social channels more people will see it, regardless of where it is placed on the site. So we then factored in how increased engagement rates would increase views.
How are Estimated Views calculated for social coverage?
To calculate Estimated Views for social platforms we look at profile followers, the engagement rate of that post and combine this with industry research.
Here’s how:
We start by counting the number of followers the profile has.
However, it's important to note that having more followers doesn't necessarily mean more views. Research indicates that people with higher follower counts tend to reach a lower percentage of their followers with each post, while those with fewer followers tend to reach a higher percentage. So this is factored in.
We calculate the engagement rate as a percentage by dividing the total number of engagements (such as comments and likes) by the follower count. For example, if someone has 1000 followers and their post receives 12 engagements (2 comments + 10 likes), the engagement rate would be 1.2%
Next, we look at the engagement rate. If the post has a higher engagement rate, it's likely to have a higher view count. Conversely, a post with a lower-than-average engagement rate will reach a smaller audience. Based on this information, we adjust the estimated number of views accordingly.
We can pull views directly for YouTube, TikTok and Twitter and they are all combined to create ‘audience’.
More Resources on Estimated Views
- This article has more information on why we created Estimated Views; The problem it solves, our methodology + FAQS relating to it.