Benchmarking Authority: a full year of DA

By: Colin Cather | Creative Director

We’ve always worked to a simple rule-of-thumb for our clients’ coverage. 

Crudely, it’s the digital PR version of the traditional ‘thud-factor’ and it boils down to - can we get coverage in sites with a DA (Domain Authority) above 40?

It’s (just) one part of setting goals for our mantra that ‘brands grow when their stories flow’ - so we’re looking for:

• Quality of coverage

• Volume of coverage

• With Backlinks

• And brand mentions (obvs)

We based the quality-score heuristic on this simple guide, (from CoverageBook and others)

DA 1 - 19: That's low... (Note: it might be that the site is brand new.)
DA 20 - 29: Pretty Average
DA 30 - 39: That's Good
DA 40 - 59: A strong link
DA 60 - 80: A very strong link
DA 81 - 100: Awesome link!

We’ve never had a good set of external data to benchmark the DA of coverage. 

Until now. 

CoverageBook published their study of 1.7 million pieces of online coverage in 2020 under the heading: “How hard is it to get coverage on high DA outlets?”

The answer, for most?

Pretty hard. They found, from this large sample...

Only 40% of all coverage has a DA higher than 40 DA.

So for the first time we gathered all our own data, and compared it. We found:

86% of our coverage has a DA higher than 40 DA. 

That’s based on 2857 pieces of (online only) coverage for our retained clients, in 2020.

Here’s the data:

Nothing is ever as simple as one measure, and that even measuring just ‘quality’ is not as straightforward as equating it to the DA of coverage.

But we also know it takes a hard-working, focused team, forging great stories and creative content that audiences want to read, and journalists want to publish. That’s part of our not-so-secret-secret.

And we know what we’re doing works when one of our clients says: 

“We saw our domain authority (of our own website)  increase from 43 to 45.
Year on year organic traffic is up 29%.”

If you want to find out more: