ShareThis Launches A Dashboard For Publishers To Measure Their “Social Quality”

ShareThis wants to give publishers more insight into how their social sharing strategy stacks up, so it’s launching two new tools — the SQI Analytics Dashboard and SQI Lookup.

SQI stands for Social Quality Index, a measurement that ShareThis announced last fall. Using data from any page that has embedded the ShareThis social sharing widget (the company says there are 1.4 million sites in its publisher network), the SQI is a score from 1 to 10 that shows how a publisher’s social traffic compares to other sites in the same category.

Until now, however, the SQI was more of a general concept — today, ShareThis has turned it into two products for publishers. The dashboard shows publishers their own social sharing data, such as shares, clicks, and traffic. Then, if they want to browse the top sites in each of the SQI’s 27 categories (such as technology, travel, and sports) and maybe crib some ideas about how to become share-able, they can visit SQI Lookup.

When I spoke to CEO Kurt Abrahamson about the SQI back in March, he said it’s not just about driving traffic. He argued that socially engaged audiences are the most likely to engage with advertising too — so a publisher with a high SQI should be extremely valuable to advertisers, even if it doesn’t have the biggest audience.

To test that idea out, ShareThis ran two campaigns with Wendy’s, one that ran on sites that weren’t rated with the SQI, and another on sites with a high SQI. The SQI-targeted campaign saw a 209 percent higher clickthrough rate and 234 percent more sign-ups.