Using Google Analytics to measure outcomes against your PR objectives

Is this relevant to you:

·       Are you interested in knowing more about what people do when they see your proactive PR outreach?

·       Do you have a specific goal in mind when you plan an outreach campaign?

·       Does that goal involve some sort of interaction on your web properties?

If the answer is ‘yes’ to even one of these questions you probably use or have someone using Google Analytics to track your users. Alternatively you might be using Adobe Analytics to track responses, which is good as it is more challenging to use than Google Analytics (GA), and so you probably a very competent PR web data analyst.

Regrettably that does not mean GA is easy. At first glance it yields some results but feels like there lots of duplication and unnecessary complication. Please persevere. If you are the right organisation asking the right questions it will help you, a lot.

I am not going to tell you how to open an account, configure settings and all that kind of thing. Get over to GA tutorial area (https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course01). Though to go from a standing start to competent will involve quite a few hours.

My intention is to offer some ideas of what GA can do to help a PR person. In particular around objective setting, and goal and conversion measurement.

A PR manager might be wondering if a single person can handle both Twitter and Facebook. And if one gets better results, should it be allocated more resources. To do that you will need data, likely from GA.

Let’s presume there is a PR plan, campaign objectives and a selection of measurable goals. These might be White Paper downloads, contact form leads, additions to a mailing list at the micro end or e-commerce sales at the macro level.

GA will allow you to set up each of these as goals and track the results. GA is quite keen on the concept of ‘valuing’ intangible actions on your site. For some this might be where things get a bit controversial. Now I am no fan of AVE’s, and the like. Setting a value on something like a White Paper download could be like trying to value of Twitter follower. And that was an argument which did not end well!

It would not be correct to value these interactions in the first instance. After a number of campaigns you might be able to make some fairly objective assumptions. Over time you may able to estimate how many of a certain type of interaction results for particular organisations in a sale if there is a tangible linkage.

For example, if you are a B2B provider you will probably have an idea that for every 20 service demonstrations you get a sale. You will know the average sale value and so can estimate the value of a demonstration, hence the value of that type of goal. But it does not work for everything so you must discriminate.

There are a selection of other facets you can check alongside you goal conversions including relative new to returning visitors, if they came by search what term did they search under and what it the general level of satisfaction with your site (bounce rate). There are a selection of attribution models you might consider to understand the progression successful buyers take and where others drop out.

My advice is to become familiar with Google Analytics. PR can benefit from access to web analytics if success is getting people onto a web property.  You really need to hold the keys to this stuff and not rely on other departments.

Thank you for viewing the article and I very much hope you found it interesting. Please don't hesitate to offer a comment, particularly if I get things wrong!  It would also be great if you wanted to subscribe to future blog updates.

Measure Camp - compulsory for anyone serious about analytics?

A few years back I was an advocate of a PR/measurement combine called Measurement Camp. This was in no way connected with Measure Camp. It proved a useful talking shop for PR to understand more about social media metrics. 

Maybe it was too early, but it seemed to miss out on the business end of analytics, dealing with techniques as they were a decade or so ago. Useful, but flip forward a couple of short years and Measure Camp came into being, not by PR people as before, but by the people tasked to quantify online experience, aka 'the geeks'.

The latest Measure Camp took place in London last Saturday. It applies the unconference format with the 260 participants suggesting topics to be dealt with over the following hours in a series of presentation rooms. 

Topics were diverse, addressing advanced pointers on using Google Analytics, j script and R; thru to philosophical discussions on what they would do differently if they could turn back time, or how you break downs the barriers to analytics (thanks to Measure Camp founder Peter O'Neill).

There seemed to be only a single presentation related to PR analytics. It was a really interesting discussion by Ed Hammerton comparing how they used to measure, with how they do it now. What made it better was it was all about the regulation-infested health sector and featured how they report on their PR activity. 

Just as PR missed out on search engine optimisation (ref. Stephen Waddington at a recent Future PR event), there seems to be every likelihood that serious analytics is now slipping away from PR. 

Particularly when considering the recent CIPR state of the industry findings that senior PR people are failing to recognise the importance of online media and measurement.

I don't want to paint too depressing a picture for PR. But if they don't want to be marginalised by advertising/marketing analysts they need to be prepared to give up the occasional Saturday.