AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent)
AVE is a popular metric that helps to track and evaluate how much value you can get from PR/Marketing. AVE refers to the cost of buying the space taken up by a particular article, had the article been an advertisement. Despite criticism (naturally, it is very difficult to measure relationships built through PR/Marketing), it can be used as an auxiliary metric in evaluating PR/Marketing efforts.
Main parameters used to calculate AVE at Brand24:
Source Reach (essentially source size - how popular is the article, blog post, or social media mention)
Source Type (did mention appear in main article or comment, on a message board or a news site)
Mention Sentiment (obviously positive mentions are much more valuable than neutral)
Additional information:
Tracking or measuring something as elusive as relationships is very difficult. Some say impossible. AVE’s purpose is to help with this challenge, but it has its flaws.
AVE is an estimation, it is not the “right value” as evaluating relationships might be very subjective.
AVE methodologies may differ across many tools as there are various methodologies for estimating Reach which is the main AVE contributor. Therefore, it is best to compare AVE from Brand24 only with AVE from other Brand24 project or period.