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Blogger Outreach is a tried and tested methodology for brands to reach outside their audiences and capitalize on the great communities passionate independent bloggers have created. The challenge has been – how do we substantiate that value?
Not only from the bloggers perspective – they want to charge fair pricing, and fair pricing means they can stick to their editorial standards and do right by their community. For their customers (brands) it means fair pricing in terms of performance.
But – how do you quantify that?
That is hard.
I myself started out as a blogger, way back in 2004, well actually then it was just a hobby. I mucked around, unsure what to write, the reality is it was super early on (I was 18 at the time) so had no idea what you could do with this platform. Plus living in sleep ole Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand – other than student antics there wasn’t much up.
Fast forward a few years, once I was out on my own as an entrepreneur, I started my bwagy blog. It was to share the learnings & ideas that come from the journey of starting something from scratch. Since then I’ve kept it up. In those early days I had one metric, attention time, I wanted the attention I was getting to be more than the time I was investing in it. i.e. I spend 60 minutes writing posts, I’m hoping to get more than 60 minutes of visitor time on the site.
So that was my metric, I watched that and sure enough after about six weeks I was in the ‘attention profit’ phase. Yuss! It was a good place to start. Now I never considered selling access to the community I had built (although a few brands did offer early on) – in reality my audience wasn’t near where it ought to be.
Now I didn’t sell any space – but if I had, how could they have quantified success? I pose this question – as I think there are a few options.
If you’re a brand, or someone helping with blogger outreach, you’re working across multiple blogs, for the same campaign.
Your challenges are:
1) Consistent data, not everyone uses the same analytics set up.
2) Pulling together multiple data sources
3) Being able to objectively benchmark
Some of your options are:
1) Whack in a Google Analytics code on each site.
You could use cross domain with a big of wiggling, poking and tweaking to get an extra analytics code.
2) Rely on independent data yourself
Consolidate all the data direct from the bloggers, extra work on their behalf and yours. On a small spend it’s gonna lift your cost.
3) Build your own tool
Always the temptation, the reality is accurate measurement is hard and often the cost to maintain just simplify doesn’t warrant the return.
However – these are valid options. The one I would like to add though is our tool Nudge.
Nudge Analytics works very simply, you drop our code on each blog post, it consolidates all the data on each of those blogs into one simple real time dashboard. At the end of the campaign you can use that to report on. Heck we even bundle some reporting in there for you (always nice when someone can make your job easier) – and of course some proactive suggestions on what you can do next time.
What kind of data do you get?
– Views
– Unique views
– Mobile vs Desktop
– Location
– Earned impressions
– Engagement
– A nudge score, which uses our algorithm to tell you what the best content is
We typically charge a monthly fee for Nudge based on volume but for these campaigns we use a per blog post fee so that you can line it up direct to your costs. Simple and easy.
A nice bonus, if you have a repeat client we can activate our Engaged Audience, this drops a cookie on anyone sharing your content, so you can seed content with them next time.
And – of course we have conversion tracking, meaning you can track all that content and how it lead to sales, sign ups or whatever else it is you want to track.
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