As the economy continues to encourage people to cut all expenses
that don’t directly benefit sales, PR people are increasingly under
attack. PR and public affairs executives will be the first to see their
staffs, budgets, and retainers cut if they can’t prove their worth.
Traditionally, it was very hard to draw clear associations between a
press clipping and a rise in sales at a store. PR people adopted
“impressions” as a short hand, with the hope that everyone would buy
into the concept that impressions are good for sales.
During good economic times, everyone does. During bad ones, people start questioning the linkage.
However, the rise of digital social media and e-commerce means that you
can directly connect a sales, leads or donations with the PR or public
affairs messaging that you’re conducting. You can track someone who
bought an airline ticket after following a link in your Twitter feed.
You can accurately link a donation given in response to an update sent
from your Facebook fan page.
By using freely available measurement tools, you can demonstrate that
your communications work drives sales and directly benefits your
organization’s bottom line. All it takes is a little time on your part
to learn how to measure it.
Step 1: Establish KPIs (key performance metrics) and organize your work
In most commercial organizations, your Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
is sales, or, for big ticket/long-sales-cycle items, qualified leads.
For nonprofits, this is donations and leads for major/corporate gifts.
For all organizations, e-mail subscriptions are a proxy for sales at
some future point.
Establishing a KPI first is crucial to all the work that comes later.
Ask yourself the question: “If I had to justify why I am kept on the
payroll every day, what would I say?” If the answer you come up with is
“driving traffic to the Web site” and you’re not Paris Hilton, try
again. (In fact, Paris Hilton’s escapades merely serve to drive her
endorsement and promotion business, so technically, not even she is in
the business of just “getting press.”)
For organizing your work, imagine that everything you do is put in the
paradigm of advertising. You can actually draw three columns on a piece
of paper and label them “Sources, Mediums, Content.” It would look
something like this:
| Sources | Mediums | Content |
| Your Facebook fan page | Social media | New stories, contests, games, quizzes |
| Your Facebook e-mail updates | Social media | Social media Snippets about what’s new at the site |
| Social media | Social Media Ongoing conversations about your area of expertise | |
| YouTube | Video | Videos about your product or service |
| Press releases | Traditional-pr | Press releases sent out to encourage linking and SEO |
| Partner websites | Affiliates | Links from partner websites that are designed to drive traffic |
| Organic search engine | Keyword placements you’ve earned | |
| Google AdWords | Cpc campaigns | Placed advertising |
Step 2: Install or adopt measurement software
Find out if your organization already has a Web analytics package
installed, such as Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends or Google
Analytics. If one of these products is already installed, then you’re
in business. If not, then you’re not likely to get anyone to spend any
money on a Web analytics package. Lucky for you, Google Analytics is free. Work with your IT staff to get it installed using the self-help video tutorials Google has produced.
Step 3: Tag your goal pages
Most Web analytics products operate by measuring “goals:” a sale, an
e-mail signup or a “request for more information.” When a user surfing
your site completes one of these actions, they pass through a “thank
you” page at the end of the transaction. Products like Google Analytics
consider the arrival at this page a mark of success, and register that
goal achievement upon arrival.
Finding the thank you pages you should be tracking is easy since you
already established the KPIs in step one. Just take the thank you pages
for each KPI and tell your analytics program to assume that a Web
surfer that visits that page has accomplished your goal.
In Google Analytics, this is no more complicated than simply pasting the “thank you” page URL into the system.
Step 4: Tag your links
Tagging your inbound links is the most important step of the process.
By tagging your links, you can tell which of your social media or
advertising activities is generating sales. The process is different
for different products, but I’ll review it for Google Analytics.
Let’s take my client EarthShare as an example. EarthShareis a national
federation of environmental charities that runs workplace giving
programs for employees and employers to financially support
environmental charities. They have an offer at http://www.earthshare.org/workplace-giving-campaigns.html designed to bring in leads about new workplaces that want to run workplace giving programs.
If they were going to reproduce this link in their bi-weekly
newsletter, they could add the following elements to the URL and track
success of this newsletter specifically. The modified URL would look
like:
http://www.earthshare.org/workplace-giving-campaigns.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WPG
Although this looks complicated, Google Analytics has a free URL
Builder tool to help you build these links. Plus, since this link is
only clicked on, and not re-typed, it doesn’t matter how long the URL
is. Furthermore, by tracking it specifically, Google Analytics can tell
you which of the leads, sales or donations came from the e-mail, and
which of them came from elsewhere.
And this doesn’t just work for items you create; you can also give
modified links to your partners, so you can track how much traffic came
in from their Web sites, and its ability to generate sales. At
EarthShare, we track all of our e-mail newsletter traffic, all of our
Google Grant AdWords advertising, and are in the process doing the same
for our Facebook work.
Nothing justifies a social media program or an e-mail newsletter like seeing sales generated from Facebook links.
Step 5: Monitor your results, and allocate your resources accordingly.
Once you’ve done this, you have the ability to measure the
effectiveness of your campaigns. Here’s data from a recent report for
EarthShare’s incoming newsletter and AdWords links:
| Campaign | Medium | Goal Conversion Rate | Pages/ Visit | Avg. Time On Site |
| Earth Share | AdWords | 0.3% | 3.85 | 2m57s |
| Donated Ads | Banner Ads | 0.2% | 1.18 | 12s |
| Biweekly | E-mail Newsletter | 2.4% | 2.51 | 2m38s |
| Green Teams | AdWords | 1.5% | 2.20 | 2m26s |
This data for the last 60 days was pulled straight out of Google
Analytics for EarthShare, and it shows that the E-mail Newsletter has
been an excellent source of goals. For every 100 unique visits to the
Web site that the newsletter generated, 2.4 of them resulted in a
donation, workplace lead or an additional e-mail subscribe (probably
from people passing the e-mail around). In addition, visitors from the
e-mail newsletter stayed longer and read more pages of the site.
Similarly good results were given from a new AdWords campaign targeted
at corporate “green teams”. On the other end of the scale, very poor
results were obtained from a generic Google AdWords account (labeled
“EarthShare”), as well as a donated banner ad campaign from a third
party yielded very poor results. These campaigns should be optimized or
paused in order to ensure they are yielding good results for the effort
involved.
Conclusion
Setting up analytics for your PR work should allow you to take credit
for sales, donations and leads brought into your organization’s Web
site in ways that you previously couldn’t. Once you can demonstratively
show that your PR messaging is tied to sales, making the case for
preserving or increasing PR work and social media programs should get a
lot easier.
Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn spend their days executing digital media campaigns at Virilion Inc. They can be reached at ssafdar@virilion.com and jalcorn@virilion.com.
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