Measuring PR: What I learned going in-house

Quick Note: Today’s entry is courtesy of Cece Salomon-Lee, marketing communications manager for ON24.

Aside from a couple of side ventures, I’ve been in PR for nearly 10 years now. Until early 2006, most of my time has been at an agency. During my tenure, one of our challenges was demonstrating our value with hard measurements — the Holy Grail for PR. It wasn’t until I went in-house, and most recently with my current company, that I discovered some neat tips and tricks to measure PR’s impact. The following tips are based on measuring traditional formats of print and online coverage.

URL Links: How do you know that someone came to your site based on a newspaper article? One thing I just learned is tracking URLs. Our marketing folks use unique identifiers in URLs to measure different marketing promotions. For example, we can determine if you came from an e-newsletter or specific Website ad because we use different URLs for each. If leveraged for releases or media outreach, I could determine if a specific reporter reviewed the online demo or if people came to the site from Dr. Dobbs vs. The Wall Street Journal. The key is to work with the marketing department to see if they have a tracking system in place for marketing promotions.

Unique pages: Alternatively, you can create separate landing pages for press releases and news coverage on your Website. In practice, you would give WSJ one page to track vs. another for Dr. Dobbs. Though this requires a lot of time and coordination to pull off, the pay-off is providing personalized content based on your target audience

Combining 1 & 2: You’ve sent an email and you want to know what captured the reporter’s eye. Was it the first paragraph or the last? Taking a page from email marketing promotions, try putting links to company information at the top and bottom of the email. These links would either be unique Web pages or contain unique identifiers in the URL so you can track what is resonating with reporters.

Blog Traffic: For those seeking to measure site traffic to a blog, I started using alexa.com to determine audience size. The difficulty is that these stats are based on who downloads their tool bar so that Alexa can track their viewing habits online. Nonetheless, I’ve come to rely on them as a way to determine a site’s influence and get some numbers when unavailable elsewhere.

Web Analytics: Ever wonder if site traffic increases with an announcement or article? For us, we leverage Google Analytics to track traffic, most popular pages and other data for our website. By working closely with your client’s marketing department, you can track numbers on the day of and after an announcement. See if you create traffic spikes with announcements or when coverage appears in the media.

Continuing on the tracking theme. If you then give each media outlet a unique landing page or tracking-enabled URL, you can further pinpoint which outlet is driving the most traffic to your site. This is also key as this can drive sales leads. For example, we closely monitor our sales lead source via our salesforce backend. We then track the progress of that sales lead to eventual sale, which means…. we can actually put a monetary amount to the value of PR as it impacted the sales lead generation process!

The key lies in understanding how your client is tracking site traffic, their sales lead generation tracking process and if media coverage is indicated as a lead source in their system.

Blogosphere Buzz: There are several tools out there for this and I found BlogPulse’s (a service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics) trend search () to be the best. Tracking the “buzz” over the past few months (up to 6 months), this trend line gives you a sense of how your PR efforts are impacting your client’s image in the blogosphere and relative noise about your company. You can also track against competitors, which is a great way to determine your momentum. Blogpulse also has a for-pay service that provides more detailed information.

The February 12^th issue of PR Week highlighted some of these points in an article titled “Many factors involved in measuring PR’s online impact” (http://www.prweek.com/us/search/article/631416/factors-involved-measuring-PRs-online-impact/) by Tonya Garcia.

Though some of the above may be familiar to you, the key point is working with marketing. The next post is how to make your client’s marketing department your friend.

Cece Salomon-Lee is the marketing communications manager for ON24 Inc. She can be reached at cece dot lee at on24 dot com.