We’ve been exploring the theme of web analytics for public relations over the last several weeks here at the LEWIS public relations blog. Previous posts in this series include:
Part 1: Web Analytics For Public Relations: 3 Reasons To Embrace Them
Part 2: How Communications Pros Can Get Started With Web Analytics
Continuing this series, today we’ll explore some specific metrics that matter for PR and social media pros to track/trend monthly for reporting and analysis. Following is an initial list, but we challenge communications professionals to put together a mix of metrics that matters for their specific objectives (these will vary per company and client):
Conversions – what is the goal of your website, specifically? Whether additional sales for an e-commerce site, demo requests for a B2B software company, press kit downloads to track media interest, RSS subscribers to build community, etc., define some type of outcome metric from the website in your analytics package as a goal. In fact, you should setup multiple conversion goals. Even if you can’t tally direct sales from the website, there is always something you want visitors to accomplish. If not, your website is a glorified brochure and falling far short of its potential.
To be clear: PR’s focus is at the top of the funnel. PR should not be (overly) concerned with conversion optimization. Leave that to the marketing team perhaps helping them along where need be. But ultimately PR pros should track/trend conversions as a KPI and pay attention to sources. For example – you might notice a link from a certain type of blogger is generating high quality leads to the site – which could provide a rationale to pursue more bloggers in that vein. But you can’t know that if you haven’t established conversion goals and you aren’t paying attention to high quality referral sources (something PR can affect).
Absolute unique visitors – how many specific people are visiting your website each month? Both PR and social media can be devastatingly powerful tools to dial up the quantity of unique visitors to a website – not so much from external mentions (although those help for sure) but probably best from content created on the website itself that’s worth sharing (and optimized for search).
Referral traffic – trending referring traffic is critical to see specifically which sources are sending quality traffic to the site month over month. You may discover, for example, a certain resource-oriented website in your category is consistently sending 200 – 300 referrals to your site monthly, clearly an opportunity to research additional such sources and pitch them for inclusion. There are easy Google operator commands to start your search and then it’s just a matter of some outreach to those sites where appropriate with a value-added approach. The point is – of course PR pros should dial up media, but we should also be open to looking at all kinds of websites.
Search engine traffic – PR pros should be looking at search engine traffic? Isn’t that for the SEOs to worry about? Yes – but PR absolutely should be taking credit too for a few reasons. First of all, SEO needs to be a part of the process for any content added to a website, whether that created by a PR, marketing, or social media team. Further, PR is responsible for acquiring some of the highest quality links to a client website. Your SEO team isn’t likely to get your company a link from a website like CNN.com or ultra-authoritative blog like TechCrunch. Sorry, just not going to happen. But hopefully everyone is working together here and multiple teams can take credit for results.
Further, be sure to break out search engine traffic via branded and non-branded queries. As your brand grows in awareness, you should see a steady trend up in search engine brand awareness whether the SEO group is doing their job or not. Concurrently, the SEO team should be laser focused on non-branded traffic as priority (which your PR team’s inbound link acquisition will help bolster).
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz points out all of the items that go into SEO – notice it is a holistic effort between multiple teams:
Campaign-specific traffic – for participation in social media, campaigns don’t make sense until you have your team in a flow of regular updates, are steadily growing a community and ready to pour fuel on the fire. What I’m saying is campaigns shouldn’t happen until a company is already a fluent participant in social channels. That comes first.
With that said – if you are engaged in campaigns and spreading them through tactics like apps, emails, mobile or specific distribution platforms it makes sense to tag them using something like Google’s URL builder tool or shorten links with the same URL shortener (like Goo.gl, Bit.ly, etc.) each time to track/trend success across platforms. With that said realize the best campaigns generally spread beyond campaign-tagged links, but anything you can do to help provide more meaningful traffic (as opposed to it all ending up in direct) will help show success, especially if you maintain the same methodology across future campaigns.
Inbound links - we mentioned inbound links previously as PR pros don’t get enough credit for building quality inbound links to a client website through both traditional and social media exposure. Search engine benefits of links aside (as links are just one signal to help search engines find and rank content) links also send referral traffic to a website and are quality signals to users as well as search engines. PR pros should be tracking/trending the number and quality of of inbound links to a site through any number of free tool (like Yahoo’s open site explorer) or paid tools (like SEOmoz open site explorer or Majestic SEO).
RSS/email subscribers – keeping track of users opted in to your content at the source via RSS/email (aka your community) is an important metric to follow. RSS might not be as “sexy” as Facebook likes or Twitter followers but growing these numbers is critical because it’s the group of users who have let you into an area where they control the signal to noise ratio. Due to Facebook and Twitter’s focus on real-time, content is basically designed to be missed unless it is new. This means your content is not really guaranteed to reach anyone unless it’s at the right place and the right time. That’s not to rule out Facebook and Twitter as powerful outposts (we’ll get into that in a moment) but growing a community who is receiving your content directly is powerful and a reason certain sites are shared like crazy in social channels. It’s because a base of passionate fans receive every update despite how noisy their streams are.
Followings and engagement within outposts – followings within outposts should grow organically as a byproduct of your inbound PR efforts. Of course, specific promotional tactics can be implemented to impact your followings, but be sure that these tactics are second tier to building your main community (likely this should be something such as a self-hosted blog, forum, etc.). You need to design a workflow of how you want content and traffic to flow through your outposts in a way that makes sense.
With that said, tracking followings and engagement within outposts will help you understand how your content is resonating with external audiences. Just be sure participation in outposts doesn’t happen at the opportunity cost of mission-critical items like high quality content consistently being published on owned web properties (that has long term PR and marketing benefits).
One sample tool to track engagement of your content on the social web is PostRank Analytics. Here’s a snapshot what the tool looks like:
Quantity and quality of organic mentions monthly – you’re probably already using Google Alerts to track your brands mentions across the web (whether truly 100% organic or due to your promotional efforts). But are you then trending the quantity and quality of these mentions monthly? This, in tandem with other social and web analytics can help you piece together the growth and exposure of your brand monthly.
Competitive metrics – don’t just track your own metrics, also trend competitor metrics and make notes of the tactics they are engaged in. This provides a barometer to measure against and also lets you observe ideas that are successful for a competitor you might want to try and execute even better.
With that said, if you are going to measure competitive metrics such as traffic (via a tool like Compete), search rankings (via Advance Web Rankings, as one potential tool), or social signals, also show the assets they are working with. For example, a competitor may be dominating you across the board in competitive metrics but might also already have a blog with 2,000 posts, 100,000 inbound links, and a thriving community. Yeah they’re winning, but now you at least can share why they are and map a path to catch up to them. This might even help you make a case to get more resources.
Of course, this is just a short list. There are any number of web metrics communications professionals can track/trend, but it all boils down to your objectives.
Next up, we’ll get into how to conduct analysis of your web metrics and turn data in strategic actions.
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