Effective Audience Analysis

Each day you walk by hundreds of ads and sit through countless broadcasting commercial, but how do companies know if they are just wasting their money. Accurately measuring the viewing of their product in the mass media is an important part of their company. Companies have since developed different ways of analyzing the viewership

With all the available principles and techniques for measuring the audience opinions, sampling provide the most accurate feedback. Probability sampling is done by interviewing a sample group of people. The book tells us that the number of people in the sample group is usually 384. They use this exact number of people to represent a larger population. When compared to other tests such as straw polls and evaluating surveys, probability sampling has the most accurate rate of 95%.

Another accurate way companies poll their audiences is magazine and newspaper audits. During this method newspapers and magazines keep track of the amount of their product that is in circulation. This allows the companies to track not only subscriptions but also how much of their product was sold in stores. They do this by counting how many issues remain in the stores.

Both sampling, and newspapers and magazines audits are effective methods of audience analysis. Each are efficient and easily carried out techniques providing the mass media with the information they are looking for to help businesses succeed.