The media and technology landscapes are ever-changing and PR must adapt accordingly. Gone are the days of traditional PR methods, such as storing press hits from newspapers in dusty old binders (which is what we found while cleaning out our office recently!). Since nearly everything our society does is digital, PR firms need to constantly evolve their strategies and look for new ways to improve. One of the most helpful tools PR pros can use to accurately measure campaign success is Google Analytics. If you’re looking for ways to integrate analytics into your PR campaigns, check out some of capabilities you can find in Google Analytics!

Use Annotations
Did you send a newsletter, distribute a press release or post a blog? Google Analytics enables you to denote these significant events on the platform. In doing so, you’ll be able to correlate the events with any spikes in activity on the client’s website or social platforms. This is a great way to track which notable events bring increased traffic to your client’s properties, so you can spend more time doing what works!
Referral Traffic
If you’re identifying top targets to reach out to leading up to a big announcement or are curious where most of your clients website traffic is coming from, Google Analytics makes it easy with its referral traffic widget. By checking out the traffic drivers, you can see which earned coverage is driving clicks to your clients’ website.
The metric can also tell you which social platforms are most successfully driving traffic back to the website. For a social media focused client, this metric is extremely useful in refining content placement strategy.
Audience
Google Analytics has an entire tab dedicated to understanding your clients’ audience. Although the audience tab provides insight to general demographics, it also gets more specific including where the audience logs on from (desktop, mobile, etc) and percentage of new visitors vs. returning visitors. These capabilities enable you to essentially follow your audiences’ digital footprint around the site. For example, if you know you’re speaking to an existing audience rather than a predominantly new audience, you can refine your content strategy to reflect that, like putting more value into blog posts.
What other applications do you use within Google Analytics to refine your PR strategy? Let us know in the comments!