How is ave calculated

If you are looking for a way to measure and report on how much your media coverage is potentially worth, you can use our AVE Widget. Within your Dashboard, the AVE widget can be further customized via the edit mode. Within the toolbar, select Chart Type and select the designed graph type. Leading academics in Public Relations, like Jim Grunig and David Dozier, have worked to develop metrics to analyze the quality of earned media clips which can be use as an alternative to quantitative metrics like AVE.

Here is a list of evolving metrics aimed at measuring the quality of the earned media coverage:. Did the mention appear in the right publication? Recommended Dashboard Widget: Top Publications.

Did it deliver the right messages? Recommended Dashboard Widget: Trending Themes. How is AVE calculated? Well, some people make things really complicated by messing with this basic AVE calculation.

Many people add in an extra number into that basic formula to support the idea that PR is more valuable than paid advertising. For example, how would the AVE be calculated for press coverage that appeared on a medium with no rate card? Undoubtedly, it would involve a lot of guesswork. Further, what if an article mentioned both your brand and your competitor, but focussed on your competitor. How would you take that into account when calculating the AVE?

And what about the sentiment of an article? Rather, each PR campaign should be analysed individually, and based on the analysis, more accurate metrics should be used.

What are the alternatives to AVE? Now what? Just as no two campaigns are the same, the metrics used to measure them correctly cannot be the same. What other metrics do you think PR should use? Let us know in the comments section below. Want to stay up to date with the latest news? Subscribe to our newsletter. About the author. AVEs are estimated by calculating the area of a printed news item or amount of air time on radio or television and multiplying the area or time by the advertising rate of the media in which the coverage appeared.

A hypothetical example: an advertisement measuring 5 inches by 3 columns would be 15 column inches in area. A television or radio AVE is calculated by measuring the number of seconds of news coverage and multiplying by the advertising rate per second or minute to reach a dollar figure. For instance, a TV news item on a new medical breakthrough might run for 1 minute 15 seconds.

By aggregating the AVEs for all the news coverage in a marketing campaign, a total figure can be reached. The total can be compared with the cost of actual advertising in a campaign to show its apparent effectiveness. Using this method, many PR campaigns are attributed a so-called big dollar value.

How did they calculate this? By the seat of their pants…. But there is no way the exposure generated by publicity can be directly compared with advertising; they are two different concepts. Publicity can be negative. Clearly, it is false to compare negative publicity with the best creative advertising. Yet most AVE calculations do just this. Few proponents of this method go to the time-consuming trouble of deducting negative articles and negative paragraphs or sections within articles.

Publicity can be neutral. Even this type of publicity cannot be validly compared with advertising because advertising is never neutral. Publicity often contains coverage of competitors including favorable references to or comparisons with competitors.