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The influential blogger you’ve been pitching name dropped your product with a link back to your website — high five! The WSJ business and technology article mentioning your company just published, cheers! Your company just made the top 10 list of best companies to work for, party on! The blog post interviewing your CEO as one of the industry’s leading innovators just went viral thanks to his inspiring quotes, company happy hour!
How do you measure all that digital ink?
With today’s access to advanced technology, the public relations industry must keep up with the data pace. Although dealing with numbers and statistics is a relatively new practice for PR specialists, it’s now part of the requirement to access and analyze public relations ROI. In the past, it was acceptable for PR to be a bit fuzzy when it came to measurement. For instance, an article about your business may be published in multiple publications, and may even result in an overall successful campaign, but how you do know which publication brought in the most traffic? Was it all of them or just one or two? This is where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics 101 Webinar hosted by Sally Falkow, Digital PR Strategists, and Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Website Promotion Specialists, gives us an overview of this valuable — and free — tool....
Plenty of people have said it before, but Coca-Cola had invested hard dollars to prove it. Online buzz is not enough to have a measurable impact on short-term sales. Online display advertising works better. While the concept seems to contradict what social media enthusiasts tend to tout, it's one of several studies that not only raise questions about the growing interest in online influence but also refute it. After all, if buzz doesn't drive short-term sales where display advertisements might, then what about influence? Smart companies don't make decisions based on single studies. Of course, according to the Adweek article, Coca-Cola isn't ready to toss out the baby with the bath water. Its digital media team points out that the findings were based on one study with one segment of one company that appeals to a particular customer. In this case, one with 61.5 million Facebook fans. Instead, Coca-Cola will continue to look for ways to measure online buzz and other popular social media counts such as video views and social sharing. The company, one of the early entrants into digital media, wants to find a predictive measure that can pinpoint financial outcomes — at least so marketers may better understand the tradeoffs among media types....
With so much data swimming around, knowing which metrics to pay attention to can be difficult. Knowing which ones matter to your company and which ones are simply vanity metrics is important if you are to improve your social media efforts... No matter what industry you’re in, data will always play a key part. Data provides certainly and cold, hard facts that can help businesses thrive. It’s no surprise that by their very nature, the Web and social media have sped up the progress of analytic tools, becoming faster and more accurate. It’s why the majority of social media sites offer up their own analytics tools and why there are many so many are looking for real stats to work from.
Yet sometimes having a lot of data at your fingertips can be a hindrance. Our analytics can be filled with so much data that it can be difficult to determine what data is useful. It can be dangerous to take one metric on its own at face value so a combination of different metrics can help paint a picture of how well your social media activity is going.
Type of Metrics
There are a number of different engagement types out there, but here are the ones you should keep in mind when you’re devising a strategy....
[Simply Zesty provides an excellent overview of social media measurement metrics. If you're serious about measuring ROI, this is a must-read. ~ Jeff]
...The principles are a simple but effective guideline for measuring PR’s value. Rather than measuring stacks of press clips, PR firms should look at how people interpret and respond to messages. “These suggestions aren’t difficult to implement and are relevant to the communications professional, irrespective of whether they are on the client or agency side. It’s about putting a system in place that doesn’t cost too much and only measures what matters,” said Andre Manning and David B. Rockland, in their article Understanding the Barcelona Principles....
Digital Influence is one of the hottest trends in social media, yet is largely misunderstood. A“how-to”guide for businesses to spark desirable effects and outcomes through social media influence...
Do PR Firms have the leg up in terms of their ability to manage the measurement of social media?
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Earlier this week, Jason Falls – IABC conference head honcho, whiskey lover, and all-around fun Louisville host – wrote a blog post called, “The Death of Public Relations.”
I like Jason, but I saw that and got ready for a fight.
Then I actually read the post…and I agreed with him.
No, I don’t think PR is dead, but his point is the industry is at a cross-roads because, as a whole, we’re not so good at measuring our worth.
He says advertising equivalency and media impressions mean nothing and that we have to stop counting words and start making business sense for the CEO. Amen. That said, I have a quick story to tell you....
Web analytics and general knowledge of digital marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) have come a long way since the days when people were measuring “hits” on a site. Tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, and proprietary systems within companies have made digital marketing reporting more simple and accessible for the average marketing professional. These days, you’re nowhere in marketing if you don’t understand your basic web KPIs, including customer engagement and conversion rates.
However, as content marketing takes the forefront in digital marketing tactics — especially for B2B and SEO marketing — marketers are still stuck in the stone age as it relates to measuring the effectiveness and impact of various forms of content. For example, consider white papers (or any page turn publication) — they are a common lead generation tactic within content marketing, yet most marketers fail to measure anything beyond “downloads.” The question remains: What can a marketer do to better understand the effectiveness of this type of content?...
The last two weeks we’ve been discussing the standard business funnel of Awareness, Acquisition, Engagement, Conversion and Retention. We started with the Search News Central article, Measuring Metrics for Success, and now here we are at last, wrapping up the whole kit n’ caboodle. We have a lot to go through today, so let’s get started! The Standard Business Funnel and KPIs
“What gets measured gets managed” is a popular Peter Drucker quote. It’s been reused and modified to include such wonderful wisdom as:
You can’t manage what you don’t measure
What can be measured can be managed
If it isn’t measured, it can’t be managed
(sigh) Yes, Originality ‘R Us… As soon as you start looking at metrics and the massive amount of data that pours in from a well monitored site, you start to realize something is missing in the measure = manage equation. Just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean you should. More specifically, just because you’re getting data back doesn’t mean all the data is important at that particular moment.... [Excellent overview of key social media measurement and KPIs -JD]
Some words are hard to love, and I have to concede that “data” is one of them. It doesn’t have any magic that makes the heart of a strategic communicator beat faster. But really, it’s so important that we should all learn to love it a little. ...Let’s face it — as a communicator you barely have the time, let alone the budget, to measure your communications activities. Yet, your senior management team is constantly asking for data on return on investment and the evidence that communications has demonstrated a meaningful result. So what’s a communicator who’s committed to measurement and evaluation to do?...
Whether you like it not, Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Radian6 are measuring your social capital -- not your influence but your potential for it. Altimeter Group’s principal analyst Brian Solis today releases a free report that explains why influence is largely misunderstood, and breaks down what 14 of the top measurement services are really good for. It eradicates consumer myths about one of social media’s hottest trends, and gives brands an action plan for making money with these tools....
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Excellent guide to PR measurement using Google analytics. Recommended reading. 9/10