Can Measurement Be A Light At the End of the PR Tunnel?
I remember my conversations with my former manager about how to measure our PR efforts and activities. We discussed different approaches, but still the most common way to present our results was to look at the advertising equivalent of an editorial article. It was difficult to explain to a Sales Promotion Department Manager that usually editorial is more than a free publication. First of all, it is not only an indicator of trust in the media, but also trust in a person who writes the article as journalists usually specialize in a particular industry. The fact that an article is written by a journalist always gives more credibility than an ad placed on the magazine cover, which is usually skipped by readers. It was tough to explain non-measurable metrics like trust and expertise to a manager with a sales background, who would see everything through numbers and dollar signs.
Another challenge that PR professionals have is that final outcomes are usually a combination of efforts by PR teams, sales teams, product teams, marketers, and more. If sales go well it’s always a credit for a sales team, if sales do not go well, the marketing and PR team are held responsible. Are you familiar with such a situation? In my experience, when communication is done well,we bring bring traffic to the website; however, customers tend to end up with technical issues, unprepared features, or a lack of products to buy. The best-case scenario is when customers get excited and are ready to wait, but this occurrence is rare. Customers typically get angry and never come back.
That is why before talking about PR outcomes I would recommend to think how you could separate your part from activities done by other teams. It will also help you see what you have done right or wrong. Measurement is getting easier nowadays, when online marketing has been called “the most measurable media ever.”
The first and the easiest way to see if your article was useful for the business is measuring traffic from the website, where it was posted. These numbers show if you pitched media with the right targets, if the news was presented correctly, if the final piece was written well, and if the timing was right. It all can be seen through traffic to the website.
One of the ways is to track traffic is to use Google analytics. Before sending a news, create a special link through the Google URL builder. Usually Google URLs look ugly and I would recommend creating a vanity URL. Besides the fact that links become shorter, customized URLs have higher click rate. Afterwards you can send that link with your news and track traffic from the source. If I want to track a particular source I would create a special link for it.
Currently I measure more than the number of users on the website, I pay close attention to the following:
1. Where people come from to my website. This is very helpful not to waste my time on sources, which are not useful. I had a case, when I developed a good news exchange flow with a popular blog. I would write an original story and create a gallery of images. After posting it live, I paid attention to the targeted traffic from the blog. Can you imagine how surprised I was, when the traffic was very small. Since then I look at traffic from all media, where I publish my news and it helps me save time if there is no good outcome after a few posts.
2. Quality of traffic. By quality I mean how long users stay on the website; how high is bounce and conversion rates. If 80% of website visitors leaves it after a few seconds it means that the media that you chose targets a different audience than you intended. You did a good job – created an interesting story, brought people to the website, but if they leave quickly it means something is off. However, don’t forget the possibility that there might be a technical problem on the website confusing users and thus resulting in a shorter view time. In this case the conversion rate will be low as well.
3. Where the most of traffic comes to and which landing page is most popular. In my case, we have independent landing pages covering different campaigns, which helps me compare outreach efforts and campaign management work by looking at the traffic and conversion rate. If you did a good job of getting a lot of publications and user traffic, but results are poor, it means that there is a problem with the landing page (it may be a bug or poor content, etc.).
4. Number of publications is a good proof of your PR work. I have experienced cases when we have more publications than submissions. It’s a signal to investigate a campaign or the website.
5. Users behavior on the website. If you actively use Google analytics, the service can show you frequency and engagement. I usually focus on:
- Engagement, which is understood as any interaction, and in our case, the sum of votes, shares, and comments on a given page. It helps understand how interesting a page is for visitors.
- Page views, which refers to the number of page visitors. The ratio between engagement and page views is a good indicator how successful the page is. A significant difference between the two is a good sign that there is something off with your article (not interesting page, technical issues, etc.) From here you can set up goals to transfer a certain number of views into engagement.
- Submissions. Because most of our content is creative competitions, this measurement is pretty straightforward and doesn’t need much explanation.
Online media is the most measurable media nowadays, which helps avoid underestimation of our work and big mistakes. Now we can see a situation before a campaigns begins, during the campaign, and post campaign results. The beauty of endless measurement is that we can see if something is going wrong during a campaign and change our tactics on the go to save the results.
Here are a few articles about PR analytics that I enjoyed reading:
PR Analytics is Not PR Measurement, but You Can’t Do One Without the Other
