How Google Analytics Can Help Prove the Value of PR

 

Public relations has suffered from the “Mad Men” problem. PR activities have traditionally been considered unmeasurable. Yet the rest of the world moved to the Jerry Maguire “Show Me the Money” philosophy and now demands PR so show measurable outcomes.

That’s why PR professionals must now possess first-rate skills in using Google Analytics to prove the value of PR to their clients and corporate management.

Christopher Penn, vice president of marketing technology and a Google Analytics certified professional at Shift Communications, explained key elements of Google Analytics for PR pros in a recent webinar.

Create Goals

A first step is to set up goals. To determine goals, identify visitor actions that add value. Those actions typically include downloading a white paper, completing registration forms or asking to be contacted.

Then determine a dollar value for the goal. Ecommerce goals are straightforward. Some ecommerce platforms can automatically transfer values. In a simple example, if a sale is $100 and 100 sales lead are needed to complete one sale, a sales lead is worth $1. PR can work with their marketing and sales teams to obtain dollar values. If they cannot obtain firm costs, they can need to infer values. Estimating cost savings is another option.

Analyze Your Audience

The Google Analytics audience section provides valuable data about the organization’s website visitors.

The number of new visitors and returning visitors is valuable for measuring PR and marketing efforts. Ideally, both numbers should be increasing.

Analytics can show the number and percentage of mobile device users, important information for website content and design. Google treats web searchers on mobile devices, which it calls navigational queries, differently than desktop searcher. Instead of conducting research, mobile searchers are most likely to be searching for the business’s location.

Using unique landing page URLs for specific PR or marketing campaigns can help measurement and campaign attribution.

Study Referral Traffic

Web-savvy PR pros pay particular close attention to referral traffic. Since PR placements may have a digital aspect, PR pros can examine referral traffic to learn how their media placements contribute to incoming web traffic.

If the analytics is linked to Google Webmaster Tools, PR pros can examine branded searches under the SEO section. Branded search, or searches for the company name, is crucial for gauging the success of offline PR measures.

Google Analytics certainly does have shortcomings. It cannot look backward at data, cannot measure clicks when people leave click stream and loses track of visitor data after 90 days. It counts clicks it cannot understand as organic search. For example, it considers incoming traffic prompted by media placements in physical publications as organic search.

That’s why surveys of visitors are crucial for understanding what prompted them to visit the site. Penn recommends a single text field rather than a drop-down menu.

The Next Step: Social Media Monitoring Services

The next step after Google Analytics is to seek a social media monitoring and measurement service can conduct searches, collect and store the clips, and sort and analyze data. Those monitoring tools save staff time by automating the search function across all media and integrate clip storage and management tools and advanced measurement tools for PR and marketing, providing greater insight into media results.

Bottom Line: Understanding Google Analytics is a mandatory skill for modern PR professionals. The service can help PR and marketing pros analyze a website’s audience and referral traffic. However, the program does have shortcomings. PR can make up for Google Analytics’ shortcomings by conducing online surveys and employing social media monitoring services.