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Newspaper advertising has long been quite effective in its purpose of providing the latest in terms of news events and classified ads of all sorts. Truly, the newspaper is one of the first ever mediums used by many people all over the world to advertise products, services, jobs, and just about everything else that warrants the attention of any potential customer. This is why it is very important to incorporate metrics in the field of newspaper advertising. This is done to make sure that the overall performance of newspaper advertising is maintained at the positive end accordingly. And where metrics are concerned, there will always be KPIs or key performance indicators to be used.

The newspaper advertising scorecard then becomes the tool that provides balance when it comes to the KPIs being used to monitor the overall performance of newspaper advertising. As expected, the metrics used in the industry would differ from one newspaper company to another. This is because the metrics used would be in line with the corporate goals and objectives that each newspaper company has. However, here are some of the common metrics used by many companies worldwide when it comes to newspaper advertising.

The first is the size of the ad itself. There have been a number of studies done in determining the relationship between ad size and the responses of the ad's target market. The general results show that the bigger size of the ad, the more number of responses it gets from its target market. However, an interesting note here is that the decrease is not really on a 1-1 ratio. On the average, the full-page ad entices roughly 75 responses. However, the half-page ad that costs also half the price entices roughly 55 responses. The quarter-page ad that can be bought at quarter of a price of a full-page ad entices roughly 50 responses. Thus, there really is no 1-1 ratio here. The ad size can then be one of the metrics to be implemented on the newspaper advertising scorecard.

However, just because there are that many responses enticed by the different ad sizes, this does not necessarily mean that every response brings returns on the advertising investment made by each client. You have to understand that as much as we would want our ads to have the largest audience possible; this still does not mean that the largest ad size is the most effective in terms of ROIs. Thus, there is a need to implement the second metric, which is cost per response.

When you take the second metric into account, you will see just how productive the quarter-page ad is. This ad can entice a third of the responses that the full-page ad can entice. However, you can do this at just a fourth of the price of a full-page ad. Thus, it would make more sense to get the smaller ad since it can entice close to the number of responses as the full-page ad. The rate of ROIs can then be bigger as well.

These are just some of the metrics that can be used for the newspaper advertising scorecard. Upon the implementation of the scorecard, what should be prioritized are the needs of the newspaper company itself.