Understanding how your messages are passively discovered is an interesting factor in determining your investment strategy. Many paid techniques for passive discovery – such as banner advertising for instance – are inherently trackable. However, it is equally true that the great content that allows your organization to earn passive discovery is often much less trackable.

First, compare paid vs. earned awareness. This metric gives you a clear sense of whether early stage prospects are learning about you through paid efforts (e.g. advertisements) or through your efforts to earn attention through content marketing. To create this comparison, chart the traffic to your website according to its originating source. Those who arrive from content sites, or without any tracking codes are most likely those you earned through your content marketing. Those who arrive with tracking codes are from your online advertising paid are paid discovery efforts bearing fruit.

When we chart these two sources of awareness, we must first remove all active discovery (such as referrals from search sites like Google and Bing) and all natural traffic (visitors who directly type in the URL without a referral). Also exclude “internal” sources of traffic, such as customer communities or online help portals because these individuals are already aware of you. This leaves just the visitor who discovers your content, and hence becomes aware of your solutions, through either paid, or earned awareness efforts.

This view is constructive in two ways. First, a direct comparison of your paid and earned efforts shows whether latent opportunities do exist. If you notice that prospects discover your solutions mainly from paid sources, you might assess if content marketing efforts could be more efficient. If however, all of your discovery traffic is coming from earned awareness, you could consider redefining your paid awareness efforts, or increasing your paid awareness efforts to generate awareness in underserved areas of the market.

The second area of value from this view is visibility into how your efforts are creating more awareness over time. This is the most crucial for earned media, which follows a “flywheel” dynamic for growth, whereby efforts to create and promote great content result in a slow and steady earned awareness process. Much like a flywheel spinning incrementally faster with each push. This dynamic is much different from the “lightning strike” of most paid media efforts where investments generate near – real – time results.

When calculating the total audience for earned awareness, it may be simpler to assume a known conversion rate and use that to calculate the overall audience based on traffic. While this technique obviously prevents any potential insights gained by understanding and analyzing traffic conversion rates, in earned passive awareness, this is often not something that can be easily optimized because there is such limited control over how and where you are mentioned. The best action is often to simply drive audiences sizes up by garnering more share of the conversation.