Monitoring your public relations campaign

Being able to measure the effectiveness of a PR campaign is nearly as important as the campaign itself. After all, what’s the point in spending money on a campaign when there are no measurements behind it? Here at Digital Online Marketing, we’re all about calculated risks and measurements — and you should be too.

Google Alerts

The simplest and most obvious method of monitoring a public relations campaign is by using Google Alerts which, whilst currently still in beta, is extremely powerful. It allows users to enter terms which they’d like to monitor and be notified about.

To set up a Google Alert, you need to enter your chosen search term. This can either be loose or exact — what’s great about this application is that there is absolutely no limit to the number of terms a user can monitor. A fantastic term to enter would be the title of the press release and a separate one of the name of the company.

It’s also possible to select the type of site the alerts should come from, how often and the volume. Depending on the type of campaign it may only be necessary to monitor “News” websites, but for the majority of campaigns, it’s suggestible to choose “Everything”, “as-it-happens” and “All Results”.

As soon as it’s all set up and the campaign has gone out, you’ll be reaping the benefits. Remember, always set these up before the campaign goes out, otherwise there are monitoring opportunities missed.

Real-time Traffic Analyses

It is important to not ignore the traffic on a website for two reasons: a) increases in traffic could mean the need to upscale a server quickly, and b) the campaign is instantly measurable. The obvious choice for this would be

Google Analytics is extremely powerful and accurate, but the biggest downfall of the system is that its data is not being captured in real-time, which means waiting 24 hours to see data — something not possible when in a crisis management situation.

The solution to this is Woopra, a desktop-client available for OS X, Linux and Windows. It works in the same manner as Google Analytics, where tracking script is inserted into the footer of each page on a website and it will just work.

Social Media

With Twitter came something fantastic — real-time search. Meaning that users no longer have to wait for bots to crawl and index data to be able to find it. It’s immediately available the millisecond that it’s posted, providing perfect opportunities to public relations companies everywhere.

HootSuite and Tweetdeck allow users to set up “columns” on their dashboard. These columns can be customized in several ways including “searches”. In HootSuite, all you need to do is press “+ Add Stream” at the top left corner of your dashboard and you’ll be given a host of options from different areas. Select “Search” and enter the term you’d like to track. Do the same with the networks you’re interested in and watch the columns fill up.

Conclusion

This post isn’t a definitive guide to monitoring your PR campaign but it should help you to handle it whether you’re a novice or an expert. If you have any other methods that you’d like to share, please comment on this post.