PR specialist are starting to lean out of their comfort shell and becoming familiar with value of simple website tracking and analysis as well as building basic web content. No longer is the time where we depended on a web team or marketing analyses. Social media has made it easy for us to benchmark our company's own success, and determine how to drive people to your website.
Google Analytics is probably the most frequent and easiest of all analytic tools. This online based program contains simple reporting of website user statistics as well as other features such as; standard reporting, custom reporting and multiple charts and graphs which will allow to see the feedback you need in order to determine what direction your campaign is leaning towards. Now depending on the size of your campaign or company you prefer to use other analytic tools such as: GoingUp, Reinvigorate and my personal favourite Clicky. All these sites are inexpensive and only require a yearly fee.
Now that we have chosen our preferred analytic tool the question still stands, "what should we publicist's try to determine?" "what will we gain out of analyzing our website's or our clients?" well don't ponder anymore, take notes while I share the answer with you.
It could be for your own company or it could be for your client, either way it is crucial that you review and analyze these certain aspects from the content:
-Keywords (What words are being using in search engines etc. to locate your website?)
-Page view (How often does the traffic on your website increase? Monthly? weekly? daily?)
-Number of visitors (How often do people come on your site?)
-Visitor location (What is the majority geographic of your consumers? Where do they visit before coming on your site, Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest?)
- Inbound link monitoring (what link are consumers using to access your site?)
Profile data (What tailoring is needed to made in order to reach your consumer's browsing habits?)
Now I know from my own experience the whole concept of using analytics is a little frustrating and overwhelming to absorb at first, but I can assure once you understand and grasp the general idea of it, your social media and overall online influence will rise vastly. The best way to understand analytics is to captivate what is going on in "real time" this will allowing you to figure out instantly how your site competes with the other within your sector. Lastly, never forget demographics, psychographics and geographics. These are very important things to learn, as it will help you view who exactly your consumer is. This way we can break this further into niche markets which will allow us to analyze our consumer down to the tea, in terms of there lifestyle, personality, location, characteristics and traits. All this information will how you to determine your traffic and content and will also tie your campaign together brilliantly, making you better as a PR professional.
