Starcom MediaVest Group and ShareThis Team Up To Create New Web Planning and Buying Metric

Publicis Groupe’s Starcom MediaVest Groupe is teaming with ShareThis, a tech company that enables the sharing of web pages, to develop and test a new buying metric to assess the value of shared content on the web.  

The new metric would measure what the companies describe as a “raw social traffic score,” by tallying both the number of times readers share pages from websites and the number of times those “shares” are clicked on by the recipients and then comparing that data to page views. 

“The resulting figure can then be benchmarked against the broader measure of social quality spanning the more than 1 million sites and more than 10 billion monthly shares that make up the ShareThis network,” the companies stated. 

The new measurement will provide a more precise way to assess how engaged people are with web content and to what extent they value it, said Kate Sirkin, Global Research Director, Starcom MediaVest Group. “If they’re sharing you know they care about it, and that they believe it would useful to somebody as well,” she said. Buyers are often willing to pay a premium for ads in content deemed more valuable by consumers and this metric will help agencies and their clients determine what that premium should be. 

On the web, shared content is becoming increasing critical to marketers’ plans. Earlier research from SMG and ShareThis indicates that sharing now constitutes 10% of all Internet traffic.

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