Thanks to the date from metrics, it has become easier to measure the effectiveness of PR campaigns. Historically, in order to gauge how successful a particular campaign was, PR professionals had to rely on somewhat mysterious reach and circulation numbers. Now anyone can improve their PR campaigns using a variety of easy to find and understand metrics.
Let’s take a look at 7 tips for making the most of metrics:
- Unique Visitors—Using Google Analytics on your website is an easy way to track not just the number of visits, but the number of unique visits. This way, during a campaign, you can see your expanded reach.
- Average Time on Site—Also using Google Analytics, take a minute to see how long people are spending on your website. Then divide it up based on where the traffic is coming from. You might notice that visitors from Twitter spend a few minutes longer on your site than visitors from Facebook or Instagram. This knowledge can help you focus your efforts.
- Brand Search—If customers know your business, they are more likely to search for you by name. It’s imperative that you measure brand search using a tool like Google Insights or Google Trends. Compare the search volume for your company with the search volume for your competitors, especially following a campaign to see how your brand stacks up.
- Interactions—During your campaign, whether you send an email or create a post, measure audience interactions. For example how many clicked the link, forwarded the email, retweeted, or shared your campaign? Using a mail service like MailChimp makes it easy to keep track of your email interactions.
- Inbound Links—Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big deal and the way to achieve a great ranking with the search engines is to have inbound links from other quality websites. Most likely, the number of inbound links increase with any campaign and you can use that number to measure the success of the campaign. Also be sure to keep track of which sites send you the most traffic, that way you can manage the influence they have.
- Brand Sentiment—If people are talking about your brand, make sure you like what they have to say. You can use different services like SocialMention to gauge the direction of the conversation regarding your company. You can also use it to make changes or amends to people who have had a bad experience and are sharing negative content regarding your brand
There are many different metrics available to help you judge the success of your campaigns. These are just a few to get you started. If you have questions, talk to us! We would love to hear from you.