NewspaperDirect Ad Value Map Measures Attention to Ads

By: E&P Staff NewspaperDirect Inc. in Vancouver, B.C., has added a feature for professional subscribers of PressDisplay.com. Ad Value Map aims to help advertisers maximize response to ads in printed media.

Ad Value Map expands on NewspaperDirect's Reading Map tracking techniques (E&P, April 2006) that monitor the exact amount of time readers spend at a particular location of a digital newspaper, down to an area the size of a postage stamp. The technology enables NewspaperDirect to identify the most-read pages, most popular articles, and most-viewed pictures and ads.

Beyond the quality of the ads, advertisers need to know how many people will see the ads and how much time they will spend reading the ads' pages.

NewspaperDirect measures both statistics daily for every issue of its 750 publications on PressDisplay.com, and for hundreds of privately labeled digital editions it hosts for publishers. It calculates the number of people who looked at a page and combines that number with the aggregated amount of time spent on that page by all readers. Detailed data are collected and presented for every issue of every newspaper, enabling advertisers to make informed daily decisions.

Statistics are gathered from millions of readers around the world, including over 1,000 libraries and hundreds of thousands of PressDisplay.com e-paper readers. To display the results in a way that is easy to understand, NewspaperDirect uses the front page as a benchmark and assigns a value to each page within the publication as a percentage of the value of the front page. Advertisers see a visual representation of each page's value in a newspaper by viewing the color-coded thumbnails of each page, which represent its value relative to the front page.

Ad Value Map has found, for example, that in many papers sections that most capture the attention of readers are those with editorials, cartoons and puzzles. The potential for advertising is high on these pages, but traditionally very few ads are presented. In tabloids, internal pages often garner a value higher than the front page, owing to page one's high photos-to-text ratio.