Venerable PR measurement tools such as circulation and ad dollar equivalency are fading. As we face tighter budgets, an ever-increasing need for accountability and the shift to digital, our industry has been finding better ways to measure the value we provide our clients.
Advertising, marketing and PR are part of a continuum of strategies that are all designed to elicit a desired behavior. While each discipline owns their respective core competencies, digital has created an ever-growing middle ground that is essentially up for grabs. This middle ground will ultimately be owned by the disciplines that can measure and articulate the value they’re providing.
As this crossroads of advertising, marketing and PR consists largely of online response-oriented opportunities, understanding your clients’ success metrics is crucial. While the success metric is not always a direct sale, it usually places the consumer in or helps them progress down a conversion funnel. So it’s essential that you are working with a client to accurately track your efforts. If your work does not add value that can be accurately measured, it will likely not be funded for long.
LEVERAGING BEST SALES TACTICS
Remember your objectives. Your goal is not to merely generate clicks; it’s to sell products or ideas while building brand awareness and preference. Measure against those benchmarks. PR executives can learn a lot from how their contemporaries in other marketing disciplines are addressing this issue. Across the marketing industry, counting clicks just isn’t cutting it anymore; it’s what happens after the click that’s important. And for public relations practitioners, clicks reveal even less about the impact of a campaign. Clicks, on their own, don’t adequately tell the story of how the client’s objective was achieved.
One of the simplest ways to track conversion is to employ a promotion code or similar method to measure the traffic that arrives at a client’s site and track it as it proceeds through the conversion funnel to the completion of the success metric. Each effort and traffic source should have its own unique tracking.
ALWAYS ATTRIBUTE
Another idea that is quickly moving to the forefront of digital is the concept of attribution, which suggests that measuring the last click is flawed methodology. In other words, when a user enters a search term or even a product name in Google’s blank box, what really inspired this action? Right now most companies would attribute that traffic to Google and call it a day, but that really doesn’t help them understand where to place future resources to scale this traffic.
Attribution is a concept that PR has been aware of for years, but unlike simply placing a promotion code at the end of a query string, attribution is much more difficult to accurately measure. Online media companies are trying to gauge it by placing a pixel in content or media that sets a cookie on the user’s machine. With this cookie, companies now have a universe of users that were exposed to media, and they can then track how exposure to that media drives clicks and sales.
Right now measuring online attribution typically consists of custom studies that employ the services of a measurement firm, but as the technology evolves, this practice should become standard operating procedure for PR firms.
OFF THE TRACK
The principles of attribution apply to offline media as well. According to a Google-sponsored study, among people who research products and services after reading about them in newspapers, two-thirds (67%) use the Internet to find more information. Of that group, nearly 70% of consumers actually make a purchase following their additional research. Again, Google gets the credit, but it was really the newspaper ad or earned media that inspired the search. But there’s no magic bullet for measuring how offline drives online traffic and subsequent sales. One of the most common measurement techniques is simple time-based analysis that correlates when offline media ran and corresponding spikes in online traffic.
Any discussion regarding online media would not be complete without tackling some aspect of social media. While Twitter and Facebook are fantastically popular today, I suspect that clients will not continue to fund online community building efforts forever without some tangible return. So as it relates to your social media activities, the principles of measurement still apply. It is imperative to align social media efforts to measurable outcomes such as driving site traffic, generating leads, increasing SEO ranking, etc.
I’ve long believed that there’s a direct correlation between the velocity of change and opportunity. While change isn’t always fun, it always presents opportunity. The emphasis that companies place on measurement and accountability is only going to increase. Opportunity is going to be seized by organizations that can prove how they’re moving the needle with quantifiable results. PRN
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This article, written by Scott Severson, president of ARAnet Inc., was excerpted from PR News’ Guide to Best Practices in PR Measurement, Vol. 4. The book is available at www.prnewsonline.com/store/. Get a crash course in measurement at PR News’ PR Measurement Conference on March 23 in Washington, D.C. (Visit prnewsonline.com for more information).