Prominence and Impact Scoring

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Modified on: Fri, 24 Feb, 2023 at 3:49 PM

Prominence and Impact Scores provide a way to measure your brand’s visibility in news coverage. Prominence is a reflection of the position and frequency of your brand mentions. Components of Impact include position and frequency of your brand mentions along with reach of the outlet in which the article appeared. 

Below you will find more detailed definitions of Prominence and Impact Scoring in the Cision Communications Cloud:

Prominence Score – This is the score achieved by a number of factors (see below) within an article such as the position of the keyword mention(s) within the clip and frequency of the mention(s). 

Media Impact Score – The Impact score is derived from the Prominence score. Specifically, the Impact score is equivalent to the prominence score times the outlet/publication tier multiplier. The multiplier used in the calculation is based on the reach of the publication. Read more about this below.

Both of these can be manually updated by using the following document for reference.

It is important to note that Prominence and Impact are additional offerings in the Cision Communications Cloud system. If you have any questions about your contract, please contact your Account Executive directly. Prominence and Media Impact scores can be found in the  Analytics profile section of the news clip profile.

Prominence Score Explanation:

A prominence score is assigned to each company analytics category mentioned in a particular article. Since many analytics searches can match a single article, a weighting system is used to allocate the overall score across each of them based on where and how often the search term(s) are identified within the article text. The overall score is capped as a company setting and can be reduced by factors such as article length and article coverage.

While the actual Prominence score calculation is proprietary, the following important criteria are all contributing factors for each Company Analytics Category mentioned in the article:

• The total number of times the analytics category appears in the article.
• The analytics category appears within the headline of the news article.
• The analytics category appears within the first 150 words of the article (approximates to the first paragraph). 
• The total word count of the article.
• The maximum possible score for an article is determined by the total word count (see table below).  Therefore, each article can have a different maximum possible score.
• The company prominence percentage is the percentage of the total that a single company analytics category owns. The total is based on the total number of all company analytics categories mentioned in the article.
• The company prominence score per company is that article’s maximum possible score multiplied by the company’s prominence percentage.

Prominence Scoring Calculation Examples:

Example 1: Within a 1,000 word news article, there are a total of 100 mentions of all companies (Company A and their competitors; Company B, C, D, etc.) within the text of the article.  This article has a maximum score of 50 since it has more than 400 words in the article.  Company A has a total of 20 mentions, or a prominence percentage of 20% (20/100).  Company A’s prominence score would be (50 Max Words * 20% (Company A’s Prominence Percentage)) which results in a prominence score of  10. The other 80% of mentions is divided amongst the competitors as is the remaining prominence score of 40 .

Media Impact Score Explanation:

The “importance” of a media outlet is determined by a tier level designated either by Cision or the customer.  Cision assigns tier levels to media outlets based on their circulation.  There are four tier levels, Tier 1 having the highest impact or most coverage based on circulation.  For example, a national newspaper such as The New York Times would be considered a Tier 1 publication.

Understandably, your business needs may require a change in the default tier structure. For example, for the financial industry, American Banker may be considered a Tier 1 publication. However, based on circulation, Cision has them listed as a Tier 3 publication. This tier structure can be overridden to the appropriate tier level for your company. To learn about the process for making changes in this tier structure, please contact your Account Representative.

The Media Impact Score is calculated by multiplying a company’s prominence score by a publication’s tier level factor.  The tier level multipliers are as follows:

Media Impact Score Example:

Continuing with the Example 1 scores from above, Company A’s prominence score is 10. The article appeared in a Tier 1 publication. Therefore, the Media Impact Score would be 40 (10 * 4).