Arbitron’s Jon Miller tackles the bigger ratings picture in your market in this week’s Programming To Win column. Miller delves in to the ways Arbitron’s tools let programmers check out trends throughout your market, figure out what other stations your own listeners are tuning in to and use the information to set your own station’s goals.
By Jon Miller, Director of Programming Services. Arbitron Inc.
Jon Miller
I feel it’s important to start off any sort of ratings analysis with an understanding of how your station is performing because what leaves your studio is also what you have the most control over.
That’s why in my two previous Programming to Win columns I’ve written about how to evaluate your station’s ratings starting with what to look at each time a new book comes out and then sharing some thoughts on how to evaluate your station’s programming benchmarks.
But, in addition to internal factors, there are a number of external factors that affect your station’s performance as well and this month we’re going to look at how to analyze what’s going on beyond your own frequency.
Market and Format Trends
To get a feel for what’s going on in the market as a whole, start by gauging the size of the radio listening universe for each survey. It can vary considerably from month-to-month or book-to-book due to any number of factors such as seasonality, travel, weather, holidays, sports, and news events to name a few.
Average Quarter-Hour (AQH) Share – which programmers use to evaluate their level of success — is actually an expression of how much of the total listening in the market is coming to your station. If the total amount of available listening decreases and the size of your audience stays the same, your “share” of listening gets larger. That means it’s possible for your ratings to go up (or down) due to factors completely beyond your control. So, in order to put your latest ratings into perspective, it’s vital to understand what the market listening levels are doing.
In Diary markets, Arbitron’s Maximiser and PD Advantage software both allow you to easily track what’s happening to the market as a whole. You can look at the “market totals” or “analysis totals” at the bottom of your reports or create a combo of all stations in the market. PPM programmers can use the PPM Analysis Tool and PD Advantage Web, which have the same functionality.
It can also be valuable to apply this concept to specific age ranges, genders or even formats. Just like the market as a whole, if the amount of listening among 18-34 year-olds or women fluctuates it can affect your share of listening among those groups. You can investigate this by narrowing the demographic and then examining market totals or by creating custom combinations of stations to compare listening levels for a particular format.
Where does my audience go when they leave me?
The next area to explore is where your listeners are going when they leave your station.
You can start by looking at what we call “cume duplication” which looks at how many people spend at least 5 minutes during the week with your station and the competition. Arbitron has standard reports in many of our software platforms to analyze that.
But for programmers it’s more insightful to look beyond simply what other stations your listeners are tuning in to and start examining their consumption levels. Your listeners might tune to six other stations in the market but only three really get any sizeable amount of listening. That’s why it’s much more telling to see how much your audience is contributing to other stations in addition to simply where else they are going.
If you’re in a Diary market explore this using report #12 in PD Advantage titled, “When listeners leave a station, what stations do they go to?” This report shows you not only how much of your audience (cume) goes elsewhere, but also how long they spend with your competition (Time Spent Listening (TSL)). Track this from book-to-book and you’ll be able to see how these habits are changing.
In PPM markets you can get even more insight by using PD Advantage Web’s “Audience Sharing” report. Just as with the Diary version, you can track contributions by your audience to other stations. Plus it also shows some other key PPM metrics such as occasions — the number of times the listeners tune in to the other station — which is a key driver of TSL.
Setting Realistic Goals
Once you’ve assessed how the market is changing and how your listeners are interacting with the competition, you can revisit your goals for ratings performance set new ones. Every station has goals, and sometimes they offer a clear and defined path to success, while others may seem so far out of reach you don’t even know where to start.
That’s why understanding your market (and your competition) inside and out is fundamental to long-term success. You may discover, in analyzing what other stations your listeners tune in to, perhaps a competitor that you never even considered on the radar. Set your sights on moving a couple spots up the ranker at a time, or simply tweaking your station to do a better job of keeping your listeners tuned in.
No matter where you are headed, the key to successful goal setting is to create goals that are both realistic and achievable.
For diary markets, the best tool to use is a report in the PD Advantage software titled “How much additional Cume and/or TSL do I need to increase my share?” It’s a simple graph with cume on one axis and TSL on the other. Each station in the market is plotted at the point where their cume and TSL meet: their AQH share. This enables you to see where your station is in relation to the competition and makes it easier to determine exactly what’s necessary to take your ratings to the next level. Add this much cume, or this much TSL, or some of each, and watch your share grow.
For PPM markets, PD Advantage Web recently launched a new report — “Rank and Share Goals” — that also lets you gauge what it takes to get to the top. A programmer can pick either a rank, a share or both that you want to reach and find out just what’s required in terms of daily cume, daily TSL and daily occasions to get there.
Any thorough analysis of your ratings should look both inward at your station’s individual performance and outward at the market as a whole. Understanding how the decisions you make, the competition’s decisions and those of your audience make affect your ratings is important for truly understanding and maximizing your station’s performance.
Follow the Arbitron Programming Services Team online at www.arbitrontraining.com/programming and on Twitter at @ArbProgramming.
