Jon Miller

In today’s advanced world of audience measurement, you have more information about your station’s ratings and more ways to analyze that information than ever before.
            Each time a new book arrives there is a veritable buffet of resources to choose from in order to analyze the data.  You can look at trend reports, day-by-day listening, audience composition, PPM meter trends, station sharing, P1 duplication, Media Monitors and much, much more.    
            While each of those resources has a distinct value for interpreting your station’s performance, there’s a much simpler process for looking at data 

Start with the Basics
            For every station, regardless of the measurement system, the basic elements of Average Quarter-Hour (AQH) Share are Cume (how many people listen) and Time Spent Listening (how long they listen). 
            It never hurts to remind ourselves of what actually makes up the numbers and, in doing so we can gain greater understanding of how these two metrics interact.  Put another way, if you don’t track the mathematical source of your ratings each book, you won’t be able to easily identify why your numbers are growing or shrinking.
            Both of these can easily be seen in a convenient trended format using Maximiser’s “Programmers Package”, or the PD Advantage “Vital Signs” report.  These should be the first step to analyzing your ratings.
            One important note, if you’re in a PPM market, the math is slightly different than Diary:  DAILY cume and DAILY time spent listening (TSL) are now the main elements of share as opposed to weekly Cume and TSL for diary markets. I can’t stress enough that the weekly estimates in PPM are nice to look at but the daily estimates are what directly affect your share.  

Check on Your Biggest Fans
            If Cume and TSL are the chief ingredients of the ratings, then the P1 listeners, those people who listen to your station more than any other in the market, are the secret sauce of your success. 
            Analysis of ratings data over the years consistently shows that this small group of devoted users account for a large percentage of the stations listening. That fact is often referred to as the 80/20 rule: 80% of your listening comes from 20% of your audience.
            In fact, P1s are so important that even if the overall station Cume shrinks from one book to the next, consistently growing your number of P1s can result in higher ratings. 
            Since cultivating P1 relationships is a daily focus for programmers Arbitron makes it very easy to monitor their performance each book. 
            PD Advantage’s “Vital Signs” report has an entire section devoted to the P1 audience, for both Diary and PPM.  This should be the second destination in your hunt for answers.  Check to see if this group is growing or shrinking, and whether they are listening more or less often.  These are important clues to why your station’s ratings went up or down, as well as insight about how the audience is reacting to your programming. 

Diary & Meter Counts
            Often the first thing a PD wants to know about when the book comes out is how the Diary/Meter returns look. It’s a valid question, without respondents reporting that they listen to the station there aren’t any numbers to measure. 
            While tracking your station’s returns absolutely should be a part of your analysis for each and every book, it’s important to keep in mind that the correlation between Diary/Meter counts and ratings isn’t direct. Adding more Diary-keepers or Panelists does not automatically guarantee higher numbers.
            For example, if your station’s respondent counts increased in the latest book, but your shares went down, this could mean you weren’t able to keep your audience engaged for the same amount of time as in the past.  The listeners are there, but they aren’t giving you enough of their time.  Conversely, you can also see ratings gains in a book where diaries or meters decline, which could mean you are really maximizing listening from that smaller audience.
            It’s all part of an intricate mix of factors that contribute to your ratings each month, and more often than not, it’s a combination of multiple elements that move the needle.
            The key is to track the sample returns for your station and then put them in context of your performance each book.  You can do so using the PD Advantage “Vital Signs” report as well as the “Diary Distribution” (Diary) and “Panel Change” (PPM) reports, all in the same software. 

Take a Look around the Market
            So far the focus has been on factors unique to your station.  How the audience is interacting with, and what kind of returns in the sample, is your station getting.
            Once you’ve investigated these, it’s time to explore where your listeners are going when they leave your station. A fancy name for this is “cume duplication” and Arbitron has standard reports in many of our software platforms that analyze just that. 
            But for the programmer it’s more insightful to look beyond simply what other stations their listeners are visiting, and get into examining their consumption levels.  It’s more telling to see how much your audience is contributing to other stations than it is to simply see where else they are going.  Your listeners might tune to 6 other stations in the market, but only 3 of them really matter.
            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 (cume) audience goes elsewhere, but also how long they spend (TSL) with those other stations.  Track sharing book-to-book to see how these habits are changing.
            For PPM, you’ll 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.  In addition, it also focuses on some of the 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.  

Knowing What You Don’t Know
            There’s a wealth of information and insights in the Arbitron ratings book, but looking at these four key indicators each time a book comes out is a great way to understand the mathematics of why your AQH share is up or down.
            It’s up to you to consider this data in the broader context of the station’s programming and the market. Compare the results of your analysis to what took place during the ratings period both on your station and in the market as a whole.
            I’d caution you not to ever over-react to any one particular ratings period. Instead, as you do this analysis for each book, start to look for consistent trends. That’s where you will begin to really see what is happening to your station.
            This is the first in a series of articles for FMQB that will focus on mastering ratings analysis. Next time we’ll explore how to effectively evaluate your programming benchmarks.
            Until then you can follow the Arbitron Programming Services Team online at www.arbitrontraining.com/programming and on Twitter at @ArbProgramming.