Web Analytics & Earned Media
What do web analytics have to do with public relations?" It's a good question, given that web analytics are most often used by SEO professionals and online marketers to track visitors and sales from search results and content advertisements.
The digitization of communications has enabled marketers to better understand the impact of their campaigns by directly measuring audience behavior. This is critical to companies that spend large sums on buying media placements or to optimize their website, as it has enabled them to understand what works and what doesn't in dollar terms. There is no reason why the same methodologies cannot be applied to the media that a company "earns," which is the media attention a company can generate through effective public relations and communications, or the "buzz" a product can generate online.
In fact, we would argue that earned media is actually a very powerful marketing channel that can be measured, understood and optimized on the same terms as paid media and search marketing. The number of unique visitors referred to an organization's website by earned media, the pages that visitors access, and whether or not they completed some goal (e.g., downloaded a white paper, made a purchase, made a donation, etc.) can be directly tracked in a way that has not been possible before—at least not without extensive primary research.
In the new paper published by the Institute's Commission on Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation (download here) we outline practical steps for public relations practitioners who want to adopt web analytics as part of their media measurement strategy. The paper focuses on what sort of data public relations professionals can obtain from web analytics, how to conduct basic quality control for the data, and how to integrate the data with other media monitoring and research.
The paper addresses how web analytics can be used to answer broad questions such as:
- How do sale conversion rates from earned media compare to online marketing channels?
- Is our corporate Twitter account driving traffic to the right Web pages?
- Are our press releases or social media releases being cited by journalists and bloggers, and if so, do they drive traffic to our corporate site?
- Is "Key Message A" more effective at driving sales than "Key Message B?"
- Should we invest more resources in social or traditional media?
- Where do we find the audiences most likely to respond to our campaigns?
At first glance, answers to these questions might appear out of reach. Fortunately, web analytics are more accessible and cost-effective than ever. This technology is not necessarily expensive (its free if you're using Google Analytics) and most large organizations have a web analytics team that can help public relations teams get the data and reports they need to inform communication strategy.
Since web analytics technology has some technical limitations and most organizations sell products and generate sales leads through offline channels, web analytics might not be the "holy grail" ROI measurement system that the public relations industry has been waiting for. That being said, it might be the closest thing yet.
In much the same way that online advertising has revolutionized how advertisers can measure and optimize their efforts, public relations can leverage web analytics techniques to measure actual user behavior and optimize campaigns to get the best outcomes.
