Public Relations (PR) is responsible for building trust, shifting people’s attention towards clients, and transforming awareness and trust into new relationships. In order for your B2B tech and telecoms business to highlight new opportunities and analyse how effective PR campaigns are for your organisation, you need to be measuring the outcome.
According to Web Technology Surveys, Google Analytics is used by 54.8% of all websites. Despite the millions of users, many business professionals don’t know how to track, analyse, and understand the data from their PR campaigns and how this can help meet their business KPIs.
Google Analytics increases your measurement capabilities by tracking a range of key PR outcomes such as traffic, conversions, companies who viewed your PR and backlinks. It offers valuable insights to show how PR activities can help you meet your business goals.
We’ve put together our top tips of what your business should be tracking to improve your PR campaigns.
Traffic
Traffic data offers insights into where your audience is coming from, whether visitors bounced or visited multiple pages. It also highlights the other pieces of content they viewed on your site.
Measuring your data traffic is good practice for many reasons. It ensures that you are reaching the right audience with the right message and maximising your reach whilst doing so. This can be helpful for determining which outlets are driving traffic from coverage.
Conversions
Many visitors don’t convert in a single visit. Google Analytics enables visibility into the contribution your PR makes in conversion activities. The data provided by Assisted Conversions within Google Analytics will tell you how many days or visits it took the visitor to convert after they viewed your press release.
With Google Analytics, it’s possible to see the actions taken by a lead before they complete the conversion process. To improve your PR strategy, it is essential to recognise the number of returning visitors and whether or not they’re coming back to the site after building their first impression. This will help you to build an understanding on how effective your PR strategy is in securing conversions.
Companies
With this data insight, Google Analytics provides visibility into all visitors to your website, including segmented visitors from PR campaigns. Since larger companies are more likely to have branded networks, businesses can easily identify whether its PR efforts are reaching the right audiences.
Through this data, your business can identify whether they’re addressing an existing audience or new audience. This enables your organisation to refine your content strategy to reflect the needs of your target audience.
Backlinks
The links you include in your PRs to other relevant media sources strengthen your company’s authority and trust with your readers. Backlinks are a powerful tool for improving your search engine optimisation (SEO) by creating an organic search rank and helping Google recognise your brand. This increases your website’s traffic and boosts search engine rankings.
Backlinks must be from reputable, credible sources to rank high in Google’s algorithm. It is important to continue to track which backlinks are performing best for your site and adapt your strategy based on this.
With Google Analytics, PR measurement can be quickly tracked, and the success of a campaign evaluated. Your business can put its next steps into place to optimise any outcomes that might have been missed.
At Ilex, our expert team can support you with expanding your PR presence through our borderless approach to PR and providing new data insights to your campaigns. Book a meeting with us now if you’re looking for support with you Google ads campaign.
