How is radio ratings calculated

This indicates whether a Target Market is more or less likely to listen to a given station for more or less time, with being the norm. The total number of hours that a station is listened to over the course of a week. This is the sum of all quarter-hours for all listeners. Weekly reach represents the number of people who tune in to a radio station within at least 1 quarter-hour period during a week.

Glossary of terms. Average Weekly Hours per Listener The total hours of listening to a station averaged across the total relevant population. Day parts Day parts are used to describe different times of day that you can target your ad campaign within. Frequency The number of times a campaign is heard by listeners expressed over a period of time. Impacts Impacts are the gross number of opportunities to hear OTH an ad. Market Share The percentage of all radio listening hours that a station accounts for within its transmission area.

Population The number of people who live within the TSA of any given station. Total Weekly Hours The total number of hours that a station is listened to over the course of a week. Weekly Reach Weekly reach represents the number of people who tune in to a radio station within at least 1 quarter-hour period during a week.

What's New What's New. They are usually broken down into targets, for example Adults , Men , Women ,etc. Dayparts: Time periods which represent one or more days of the week. Audience estimates are presented along three dimensions: Geography, Demography and Daypart. For example a station's share of the ratings is given in this manner.

In the MSA a station has a 5. Cume: Represents a station's total reach. In this measurement each audience member is counted only once. This represents the number of people who have sampled the radio station. Regardless of whether a listener tuned to the station one time or many times during the course of the week, he or she is counted only one time.

AQH: Represents the number of people listening to a station during any given fifteen minute period. In this measure listeners may be counted many times. If a member of the audience is tuned to a station for at least five minutes, he or she can be counted. Cume and AQH are better understood by making a comparison to supermarket shopping. For example Mary and John shop at the same supermarket. Mary makes one 15 minute trip to the supermarket during the week and John makes five 15 minute trips to the same market.

In the cume John and Mary are each counted one time. If the store is interested in how many different people have visited the store during the week, Mary and John are each counted as individuals. If that same store is then interested in how many people are shopping in the store during any given 15 minute period, John is represented for each of his five trips, while Mary is counted for her one trip to the market. Two areas that confuse people are rating and share. When people say "rating: they are generally talking about "share".

Rating: An estimate expressed as a percent of a universe. It is a percentage of the people in the market who listen to a specific station. Arbitron no longer reports these numbers. Share: An estimate of the persons using radio in a market PUR who are tuned to a particular station. Arbitron reports these numbers. AQH persons:. An estimate of listeners to a station for any given quarter hour. For display purposes the last two 00 are dropped. For example "93" does not indicate that 93 people are listening, it means that 9, people are listening.

Programmers take the raw numbers and put them into several formulas to give an even better example of a station's audience. These numbers are used to compute several things. Programmers want to know about audience loyalty. Sales departments and advertisers want to know how cost effective it is to advertise on a station.

It is computed by multiplying the number of persons listening during the average quarter hour by the number of quarter hours available in the daypart and then dividing that number by the cume. For example if a station has an AQH audience of 8, and a cume audience of for the morning drive, they can compute the TSL.