Whether you’re a magazine selling ad space or an event tweeting on behalf of a sponsor, it can often be a guessing game to determine what amount to charge when negotiating advertising rates. Conversely, without adequate performance measurement, sponsors blindly cross their fingers and hope that the dollars spent on your promotional efforts are paying off.

I often consult with Customers who are seeking advice on how to utilize the Uberflip platform to better measure the success of their sponsored content. In this post, I’d like to summarize some of the best practices that I typically advise. While these are particular examples that may or may not be directly applicable to your use case, hopefully this will shed some light on the importance of analytics and how you can use these to your advantage.

Why Measure?

Having concrete stats on the success of your advertising efforts will make both you and your sponsors happy. With this info, you’ll have better ammo to back you up when it comes time to sit down and negotiate your rates. While your sponsors might not at first enjoy paying more, they will love seeing evidence that their dollars are being well spent.

Measuring Your PDFs

One of the many limitations of PDFs (and trust us, there are many), is that they offer no insight into reader engagement. You might be able to track if your PDF was downloaded, but you have no awareness of whether the PDF was even opened, let alone what content your audience specifically engaged with.

Our Metrics provide you with everything you’ll need to assess the value of each piece of sponsored content in your PDF. These will vary depending on the type of content in question, but the 130+ reports are bound to help you from whatever angle you are looking at. Some key Metrics that are particularly useful for sponsored content are:

• Page views
• Time/page
• Links clicked
• Zoom points
• Social shares
• Pages downloaded

Measuring Your Sponsored Web Content

If you’re reading this article, you’re likely reading it within the Uberflip Hub. Our Hub is the home not just for our blog but all of our web content – Twitter, Instagram, Flipbooks, YouTube and so on. In addition to centralizing all of our content and making it more engaging for our audience, having a Hub also has a ton of behind-the-scenes advantages.

By pulling your disconnected web content into a Hub, you now have the ability to measure the effectiveness of your content as well. Regardless of what type of Item (e.g. a tweet or Flipbook) you are looking at, you’ll now be able to see how many views each Item has had and combine this data into your executive summary.

Creating New Opportunities

Having a Hub also provides you with new ways to optimize your existing web content for your sponsors. Notably, you can add a Call-To-Action (CTA) to any part of your Hub. A CTA is a box that you can place within your Hub in order to entice a certain behavior from your audience (e.g. “Click here to learn more” or “Sign up for updates”). Whether on your Hub’s main landing page, between Items in a Collection (a grouping of Tweets, Flipbooks, and so on), or beside an Item, you can now offer prime real estate for sponsors in new places. In just a few clicks, you can place a CTA next to a YouTube video, tweet, and other locations otherwise unavailable outside of a Hub.

Of course, you’ll also have access to all the insight you’ll need to measure the success of your CTAs. You’ll be able to report not only on how many impressions your CTA have made, but also the percentage of those that actually followed through and clicked on the CTA.

Do you utilize analytics for your sponsored content? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments below!