Estimated views in a nutshell
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.
Say for instance you are one of the brands mentioned here. If we look at SimilarWeb's site-wide traffic, it predicts that 301 million people visit the Guardian in 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 site-wide 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 - site-wide visits data is still a major factor - the more traffic the site has, the more people are likely to see your coverage.
How much content does the site have? - 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 a 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 was the coverage shared on social channels? - If an article has been shared a lot on social channels (we pull X, Pinterest and Facebook shares), we'll amplify the views to account for the additional sharing activity, where more people are likely to have viewed the piece.
How are Estimated Views calculated for social coverage?
To calculate Estimated Views for social platforms, we look at the account's audience (follower, subscribers) the engagement rate of the post and combine this with industry research.
Here’s how:
We start with the social account's audience (followers, subscribers).
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.
Where possible we'll pull actual views for social platforms like X, YouTube, TikTok and Twitch). Where this isn't possible we'll add our Estimated Views data.
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.