How to measure the effectiveness of your PR campaign
Gone are the days when clients were prepared to accept AVE (Advertising equivalent) as a measure of how well their PR agency or PR strategy was performing. We believe that’s right, too, because column inches gained, which is what AVE measures, doesn’t translate into business-changing performance!
Your PR agency could be gaining huge AVE but in a sector media that isn’t relevant to their client, so no matter how many column inches they gain, it’s never going to translate into sales leads.
Track your links
However, Tracking Links is now a far more accurate way of measuring how your PR strategy is working and essentially it quantifies the number of visitors to your website from each article, blog or social post that is placed. And with more magazines and journals now having online versions, it provides a really accurate measure of the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
That represents a huge step change and, as we know, the more targeted visitors you get to your website, the more opportunity you have to convert them to a sale. In simple terms, a tracking link is a standard URL with additional information tagged to the end. These tags can be used to indicate the channel a visitor comes from, the specific piece of content they clicked through from and the campaign where it originated. For example, we can identify when a visitor clicks through from one of our blogs, trade articles or press releases that is placed on any external website. The same applies for social media as well, and we can identify which post generate the most click throughs.
We’ve developed a really easy way of creating and measuring these tracking links. All you really need is Google Analytics installed on your website and our team can do the rest. Once we’ve set up the system, we can then measure the number of visitors from external link building to your website. The kinds of links we can measure are:
Trade articles, white papers and thought leadership pieces
Blog posts that are on external website or online trade magazines
Article and blogs that are shared via social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn etc)
Email marketing campaigns (website/blog links within your marketing emails/newsletters)
Online marketing campaigns (online advertising, PPC/paid search, SEO)
Creating these tracking links is a great way to measure the effectiveness of PR, SEO and digital marketing campaigns, which is why we routinely use them with our trade articles, press release, social media, blog or organic SEO campaigns.
In summary, link tracking allows us to demonstrate the effectiveness of PR and digital marketing campaigns for the construction and manufacturing sector, helping clients to improve their marketing ROI. By using link tracking, we can let clients know which campaign is generating the most click-throughs and that adds value to their business by providing them with better management information.
For more information or to speak to us about how to make the most out of a Public Relations campaign, email hello@dragonflypr.co.uk or call 0114 3495344.