Digital Asset Impressions: A New SEO Reporting Metric

The other day I was talking to one of my teammates, Tim Spektor, about the complications inherent in SEO reporting now that SEO includes optimization of assets beyond a single owned website (commonly referred to as Digital Asset Optimization or DAO). All of these assets are basically opportunities to impress upon your customers your company's value. What's tricky is that customers interact with different assets in different ways e.g. views, clicks, and, shares. Attempting to report all of the asset impressions on different sites as individual metrics would result in a report too overwhelming for most to appreciate.

As a result of this conversation I had, I came up with a new metrics I've labelled Digital Asset Impressions (DAI). There are just a few steps to calculating a DAI value.

1. You'll need to identify all of the ways that people will encounter (i.e. impressions) the digital assets under the influence of your SEO / DAO efforts.
2. For each touchpoint, determine a relative weighting that reflects that value of that impression to you. I like to use actual costs as a baseline. For example, if a Stumble costs 10 cents and Tweet costs 50 cents, then a good starting weight is 1 for a Stumble and 10 for a Tweet.
3. For each impression type, multiple the number of impressions by the appropriate weighting.
4. Sum the values to get your Digital Asset Impression metric.

You then treat your DAI just like you would treat any other metric — compare it MoM, trend it on a graph, or identify a target value to guide future efforts.