In the past, I’ve described some of my “tricks” to help understand Nielsen rating results more fully. The best way to get to the data is the PPM Analysis Tool, while not the most elegant piece of software out there, it can do most anything your analytic heart desires.
Today, I’ll cover custom survey periods. As a Nielsen subscriber, you get PPM monthlies and perhaps your company buys the weeklies as well. No doubt, you tear the results apart using any number of dayparts and demos and some may be custom based on your needs. But have you ever played around with custom survey periods?
Here are some reasons to use this feature:
- Your morning show (or one of the stars of your morning show) was on vacation or out with an illness
- If you have access to weeklies, you can put the multiple weeks together in AT and see how you’re doing so far in the month.
- An event in your market caused listening to move in a unique way (think LA fires or your own local weather issues)
- A national event may have affected ratings. Were listeners more likely to cume a sports talk station on the day after the Super Bowl? How were estimates affected when Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour came to town?
Analysis Tool allows you to create just about any survey period you might want. Would you like to look at a particular day of the week across a number of months? Or maybe you want to review a monthly minus a day or two?
Here’s how to do it in Analysis Tool: Whether you’re running a ranker or a trend, click on the “Survey” box just as you always would. However, when the “Survey Manager” box pops up on the screen, notice the tab on the top left for “Custom”. Click on it. At the bottom of the box, click on “Add”.
Analysis Tool will now give you something that looks like a calendar. There are two options on the left: “Calendar” and “Multi-book”. The latter lets you put together any sort of combination of monthlies or weeklies (not together, though), but let’s focus on the former.
Now that you’re in the Calendar section, you can choose any individual date(s). You have access to every individual day for which you have data in AT. If you’re only interested in weekdays, click the “Workdays” button in the right-hand column and all the weekend days will be grayed out. Unfortunately, Nielsen’s definition of “workdays” includes national holidays (you can’t have everything), so if your thought was to create a report with a month that includes a major holiday, you can still do it, but the system won’t prompt you for that option.
Pick the days that you want to see as a custom survey period from the calendar. You can mix and match months and even years if the data are in your system. When you click on a specific day, the system will put a circle around it, signifying that you’ve chosen that day.
When you’ve picked all the days that you want, go to the top of the box where there is a white space labeled “Survey Name”. You need to name your unique survey. Just about any characters work. Once you’ve named your unique survey period, click on “OK” and the custom survey period will be saved.
If you want to use that survey period (pretty obvious, otherwise why bother setting it up?), go back to the Survey Manager and click on the “Custom” tab again. Your new survey period should be waiting for you as an option, just as if you chose a standard monthly. You can now select this custom period and run it in AT as you would any other run.
As always, there are some caveats to keep in mind. AT is set up to run weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies, in other words, standard measurement periods. Custom survey periods can raise weighting issues. Further, if you cut across years, population estimates change each year, and this could have a minor effect on the estimates.
You might wonder how I used to use this option during my time at Cumulus. One trick was to look at individual days of the week across multiple months. I wasn’t as concerned about station performance as I was about Persons Using Radio (PUR). What was the heaviest listening day of the week? The lightest? If there was a consistent result (and that was the case in some markets), put your best foot forward on the days with the biggest potential audience. Further, does your station’s performance match the listening levels? If not, why not?
Your company is paying Nielsen for the data and Nielsen has given you the option to answer your questions in AT. If you aren’t using the data to maximum advantage, here’s one way to get more out of it.
Let’s meet again next week.
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