How to Measure PR with Marketing Analytics

Using key marketing analytics to measure public relations is an important component in a successful business and marketing strategy. Traditionally, most people have considered it too difficult to measure the return on investment of PR, especially for business-to-business companies.

However, at Walker Sands, we know it’s possible to gain insight into the effectiveness of PR programs with Google Analytics. With everything shifting to digital, it’s advantageous for companies to use Google Analytics for valuable insights and metrics. Strong PR will strengthen a company’s bottom line, so it’s critical to gain a solid sense of the quantitative impact of PR on business and sales growth.

There are several metrics you can track on Google Analytics to gauge the success of your PR program:

• Website Traffic: Measure website traffic before and after a PR push. With Google Analytics, you can also view the source of this web traffic. By analyzing any spikes in traffic and the source of traffic, you can understand whether your PR efforts are working.
• Events and Actions: An event is a pre-defined action that a user takes on your website, that Google Analytics tracks and monitors. This feature allows you to go beyond basic metrics like page views to better understand how a user interacts with your website and the effectiveness of your site content and PR efforts. Since Google Analytics does not automatically track events, you will need to set this up yourself. Although you will need to know HTML coding, the effort is well worth the insights gained. You can find a step-by-step guide about how to set up event tracking on Google Analytics on our website at.
• Inbound Leads: Asking website visitors fill out a Contact Us form on your website to speak to a sales representative or receive more information is a great way to capture online leads. You can also request contact information from users who want to download a whitepaper or other resources available on your site. When a user fills out a form, you can ask how they found your website or resource to see if it was a result of PR. Additionally, you can check your Google Analytics to see whether the visitor came to your website from a PR source.
• Prospect Credibility and Conversions: If you are reaching the right audiences with your PR campaigns, you should see an increase in qualified leads and credible prospects. You can measure how many of these visitors are converting through Google Analytics.

Using Google Analytics to Obtain Marketing Analytics

To improve your marketing analytics and PR measurement capabilities, sign up for Google Analytics. It is a free tool available for anyone to use after registering at https://www.google.com/analytics.

You will need to include a small piece of JavaScript code in the HTML of every page of your website. Once you’ve created your Google Analytics account, you can log in and register your website. When you configure your settings, Google Analytics will prompt you to download the HTML coding on your website. After completing this step, Google Analytics will track every visit to your website and web pages, and you are on your way to leveraging marketing analytics to measure PR success.

For more information, download our Step-by-step Guide for Measuring PR with Google Analytics or shoot us an email at digital@walkersands.com.