With so many channels available to reach key audiences, it’s become more important than ever to measure the effectiveness of PR. But are there good quantitative ways to determine whether PR is hitting the mark for the business? It’s actually a lot easier than it used to be.
As the media landscape has become more digitally driven and tied to business outcomes, measurement tools and methodologies are becoming more sophisticated. Savvy marketers can use these tools to discover how their PR efforts are moving the needle for the business overall.
Identifying Key Performance Indicators
The right PR program can do a lot to build the visibility and credibility it takes to meet specific business objectives. Measuring PR success starts with developing key performance indicators, or KPIs, that align with the goals of the business. Is your goal to encourage partnership or investment, increase sales, gain the attention of investors or establish industry leadership?
Historically, many organizations have tried to measure the value of their PR efforts with advertising value equivalency (AVE). This falls short because AVEs cannot capture the outcome of a PR campaign, measure the messages delivered or determine the value of keeping a client out of the media spotlight in a challenging situation. Other measurement approaches, such as overall clipping counts and number of impressions, are generally inconsequential nowadays.
To really know if your PR program is making progress, key results have to be quantitative and measurable. This could include the number of new leads, the percentage increase in web traffic or sales, number of conversions and so on.
Another key step that is sometimes overlooked is setting baselines. After all, without a starting point to measure against, you won’t have a complete and accurate picture of progress. Once KPIs have been identified, make sure to look at how these key metrics have performed for at least three months prior to kicking off a program. This benchmark will help to show if efforts are moving the needle in the right direction. Also, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds by looking at specific point-in-time numbers too granularly. Assessing and reporting on results on a quarterly and yearly basis is a better approach to analyze progress over time.
Increasing PR Effectiveness With The Right Website Analytics
We use Google Analytics for our clients to measure PR impact because it’s a powerful instrument to track, fine-tune and demonstrate the impact of PR successes on website activity. This free platform can also be integrated with other tools. To get started, ensure that the website of interest has the correct plug-in installed (there are free and paid options available) and your Gmail account has permission to read and analyze the data.
Website analytics typically include metrics like referral traffic numbers, traffic sources, session activity and goal conversion rates. A goal conversion measures when someone goes to your website and engages with one of those high-value actions that are deemed most impactful by your marketing team.
If programs are set up properly, these metrics can be directly attributed to PR efforts. You can use these analytics to determine things like which PR articles drive people to your website, whether they stay to learn more and if they end up engaging with your site further. These details indicate how effectively different types of content, topics and publications are driving web traffic and compelling potential customers to complete calls to action, like downloading a white paper or scheduling a demo.
This information not only enables users to gauge effectiveness, but also optimizes PR efforts. For example, if your goal is to increase qualified sales leads, identifying the traffic sources, publications and topics that produce the highest number of “visits” will serve to fine-tune efforts.
Website analytics also enable businesses to quantify and measure the impact of backlinks generated from PR activities. Google’s search engine prioritizes rank to websites with greater numbers of backlinks (direct links to each site), meaning PR has the potential to significantly increase a client’s SEO through inputting backlinks in coverage and other web content, when appropriate. Measuring the overall number of backlinks and their engagement not only demonstrates web traffic referrals, but also shows how efforts are impacting SEO and marketing objectives.
Integrated Reporting Tools
Integrated analytics tools are now table stakes for savvy marketers. As mentioned above, many platforms can be integrated with Google Analytics to demonstrate how PR-generated coverage correlates with website traffic. These tools can actively track for client and competitor mentions across the web, provide insightful metrics and generate reports.
This makes for a powerful unified console to analyze and share measurements, including statistics on session numbers, new visitors, session behavior, bounce rates and goal completions. These types of metrics can prove the effectiveness of PR strategies in driving overall brand awareness and leads.
Marketers can also use metrics aligned with established PR goals and client business objectives — such as total coverage, readership, competitive share of voice and sentiment — to measure and demonstrate how effectively the program is working.
With the plethora of options available, it can be challenging to identify which tool best fits your specific needs, but there are a few key things to look for. Not only should it have the ability to track coverage, produce the metrics listed above and integrate with Google Analytics, but it should also deliver a customizable user interface with visually compelling reporting functionalities. At the end of the day, the solution you choose should effectively streamline monitoring efforts and cut out as much manual work as possible.
Smarter Metrics Create Success
As the number of available communication channels has multiplied, careful measurement has become essential. Without it, there’s no way to understand where marketing efforts are gaining traction. Make the most of the tools that are available to track and measure the effectiveness of your efforts. This will show which activities and channels are producing ROI and which need to be tweaked or discarded for maximum results.