If digital PR is not part of your SEO strategy, your company is missing significant opportunities. Digital PR can help:
- Increase brand visibility;
- Enhance brand reputation;
- Encourage audience engagement;
- Improve search engine visibility;
- Increase lead generation.
And that’s not all. Digital PR is a surefire way to obtain high-authority backlinks that can effectively boost your rankings. Why? Digital PR focuses on securing links from reputable sites, like online news sites and resources with data-driven stories that target a specific audience.
It’s a tactic with many moving parts. But once you’ve created your digital assets and maximized their online presence, the next step is to analyze the campaigns to ensure their success. However, digital PR campaigns use slightly different metrics than SEO campaigns. This is because digital PR metrics tend to be more qualitative than quantitative, using insights for perception rather than technical factors.
No matter what your PR goals are, there are key metrics that all campaigns should cover.
Backlinks
Digital PR is a strategic avenue to obtain authoritative backlinks. The combination of reputable sources and high-quality content equates to high-powered links. It’s crucial to monitor the backlinks you acquire from your digital PR campaign to ensure they enhance your site's performance.
When assessing backlinks, it’s not the number but the quality that matters. A single authoritative link from reputable sites pointing to your page is the digital equivalent of a five-star rating, a testament to the quality and value of your content.
Consider these factors when you evaluate your backlinks:
- Domain Authority and Page Authority: These are third-party metrics that Google does not consider; however, they can give an idea of how a website performs in search. Websites with higher DAs and PAs generally perform better, but it’s important to note that these metrics are only estimates and should be used with other metrics.
- Relevance: Google uses relevancy when crawling pages because it helps cut through the spam and filter out websites that don’t match search queries. That is why links that are topically relevant to your content are more valuable, as irrelevant links are a red flag for Google.
- Human Value: Your inbound links should bring value to your human readers. This helps create a better user experience and builds trust with searchers.
- Anchor Text: Anchor text conveys a link's relevance and context. If it appears spammy or misleading, it indicates a low-quality link that could hurt your SEO.
You can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to analyze your backlinks and monitor search engine rankings and organic traffic changes.
Media Mentions
Media mentions measure how often your brand or message is mentioned across different online sources, such as social media, news articles, blogs, and forums. By keeping track of media mentions, you can better understand the reach and visibility of your PR campaign. The more mentions you have, the more likely your content will resonate with your target audience.
Media mentions are not just a measure of your campaign's reach and visibility but also a valuable tool for understanding audience perception. Analyzing audience engagement through media mentions lets you gain insights into how your target audience perceives your brand. This information, whether positive or negative, can be instrumental in adjusting your messaging and communication strategy to better resonate with your audience.
Media mentions can also provide valuable information about your competitive position. By tracking how often your competitors are in the media, you can stay updated with the latest industry trends and adapt your strategy to stay ahead of the competition.
Another important aspect of media mentions is that they can help you monitor your online reputation. By tracking mentions of your brand across different online sources, you can quickly identify any negative comments or feedback and respond to them promptly and appropriately.
Finally, media mentions can also help you assess the impact of your partnership engagement. For instance, if your brand is mentioned in association with a partner, you can track how often these mentions occur and assess the impact of these partnerships on your brand awareness and reputation.
Website Traffic
You can measure digital PR success by analyzing the traffic your site gets. This can be done in various ways, such as examining page views, the number of visitors, and bounce rates. However, it may also be savvy to analyze where the traffic comes from to see if it’s coming from the audience you want to reach.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic refers to visitors who land on your website by clicking on a link from another website. Analyzing referral traffic helps you understand how effective your digital PR efforts drive traffic from external sources. By tracking the volume and quality of referral traffic from PR-related sources such as news articles, guest blog posts, or influencer collaborations, you can assess the impact of these efforts on website visits.
Organic Search Traffic
Organic search traffic represents visitors who find your website through search engine results without clicking on paid advertisements. Digital PR activities can improve your website's search engine rankings and increase organic search visibility. By monitoring changes in organic search traffic over time, you can measure the long-term impact of PR efforts on your website's SEO performance.
Direct Traffic:
Direct traffic refers to visitors who navigate directly to your website by typing your URL into their browser or accessing it through bookmarks. While direct traffic can result from various sources, including brand recognition and offline marketing efforts, PR activities can also increase direct traffic. By analyzing trends in direct traffic following PR campaigns or prominent media mentions, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your brand-building and awareness-raising initiatives.
Understanding the sources of your website traffic is a key step in evaluating the effectiveness of your PR efforts. By analyzing the different traffic sources, you can gain valuable insights into how your PR activities influence your website visits. This understanding can help you refine your PR strategies and focus on the most effective channels.
Lead Generation and Conversions
Lead generation attracts and captures potential customers' interest in your products or services. Digital PR activities can contribute to lead generation by increasing brand visibility, credibility, and trust among your target audience.
Conversion tracking involves monitoring and measuring the actions taken by leads that indicate progress toward becoming customers. These actions include signing up for a newsletter, downloading a whitepaper, requesting a demo, or purchasing. By implementing conversion tracking mechanisms, such as tracking pixels, cookies, or form submissions, you can attribute conversions to specific PR campaigns or initiatives.
Not all leads are created equal, and assessing lead quality allows you to focus your resources on leads with the highest likelihood of conversion. Analyze lead characteristics and behaviors to identify patterns and refine your targeting strategies accordingly. Evaluate the quality of leads generated from PR activities based on demographics, behavior, engagement level, and intent to purchase.
Optimize conversion rates by analyzing the effectiveness of landing pages, calls-to-action (CTAs), and conversion pathways associated with PR campaigns. Conduct A/B testing, usability testing, and user experience analysis to identify areas for improvement and implement changes that enhance conversion rates. Continuously optimizing conversion elements can maximize the impact of PR-driven traffic and leads.
These metrics are the baseline for your digital PR success. No matter what your goals are for your campaigns, you can track, measure, and pivot based on the metrics you decide to analyze.
