WHAT YOU SHOULD LOOK FOR IN PPM RATINGS John Snyder – Radio and Records As an experienced programmer, odds are you can break down a quarterly survey or a monthly trend with your eyes closed. But now that Arbitron’s Portable People Meter is coming to town in the top 50 markets, “the book” will go from quarterly to monthly, and “trends” will go from monthly to weekly. That means it’s time to learn a few new tricks when breaking out your PPM ratings reports. Here are a couple of guidelines to get you started.
Focus on the right estimates: AQH ratings and AQH persons. Remember that share now has a new definition. It’s no longer share of radio listening but share of encoded radio station listeners. You’ll probably notice that, overall, the shares are higher than you are used to seeing. While comparing share against other stations is useful for competitive purposes, you may want to consider focusing on AQH persons or AQH ratings. These are the estimates that really drive revenue for the station. Also consider air talent bonuses on these estimates. Overall, they will have much less bounce and their bonuses will be much more in line with station revenue.
Focus on the right estimates: daily cume. In the PPM service you will notice that there are now two different cume estimates, daily and weekly. Pay attention to daily cume more than the weekly cume. While weekly cume is the estimate we are all familiar with, it actually doesn’t factor into AQH share, ratings or persons in the PPM service. You will also probably see more bounce in your weekly cume estimates than you saw in the diary due to the nature of passive electronic measurement.
PPM ratings are based on average daily cume estimates, not weekly cume estimates. When it comes to figuring out your share or your rating, the daily cume and the daily TSL are used in that calculation. |