Online PR is now becoming more popular and more affordable, though many agencies and individuals are still struggling to measure the effect online PR has on brand revenue. Normally, PR is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and the public, however online PR is the practice of managing the flow of information and its direct effect on an organisation’s bottom line.

Brand, Product and Service Web popularity

Understanding how online PR has increased the popularity of an organisation and its service. Google trends: Website and keywords based Google Trends Tool. Google Trends analyses a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for a term, relative to the total number of searches conducted on Google over time. It then shows a graph with the results.

Twitter buzz: Another way of monitoring a website’s popularity is to see if people on Twitter are talking about it using tools such as TwitterHolic.com , TwitGraph.com and TweetStats.com

Trendrr: A free web based service which tracks and compares data. Use Trendrr to identify trends across social graphs and networks, realize the potential of p2p and track engagement metrics all in real time. ROI: Can be calculated based on website conversion rate taking into account medium and long term additional traffic. Popularity following PR – Popularity prior to PR * lead value = ROI.

Website Traffic & UVs

Understanding how online PR has increased the number of website visitors. Using a client’s own analytics either by creating a unique landing page (www.example.com/offer) or simply monitoring uplift in traffic to an existing page. 3rd party tools such Compete.com can provide an indication of uplift in traffic, though slightly delayed and not as accurate as a client’s own analytics.

ROI: Assigning the campaign a unique URL or adding a tag to an existing URL, Google Analytics (or any other analytics package) can track the uplift in website traffic as a result of PR activity. Website traffic following PR – Website traffic prior to PR * Website conversion rate = ROI

Phone and Lead Prospects

Understanding how online PR has increased the number of phone leads. Either by assigning a phone number in a PR creative, at the dedicated landing page or comparing calls prior to and after PR activity, phone calls and conversions are measured.

ROI: Measured using a client’s phone system. Revenue from calls following PR – Revenue from calls prior to PR = ROI (unless unique number is used).

Coupon Redemption and Mail Order

Understanding how online PR has increased the organisation’s revenue by using coupons and mail order. Either by providing a discount code or by measuring the uses of an active coupon prior to and after PR (promotion code).

ROI: Measured by the amount of uses. Total revenue = ROI.

Social Bookmarking

Understanding how online PR has increased the popularity of the organisation and its service in social media. Social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, organize, search and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of metadata. Users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public (can be saved privately) and shared with other people or groups. The end result is quick and easy access to a URL.

Socialmeter is a web tool that scans how popular a web page is throughout major social websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, and Delicious. It gives the matrix a “socialmeter” which can help determine how popular a website (or product is) within the social landscape. Popuri.us is another tool which checks at-a-glance the link popularity of any website based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc). However and perhaps quite suprisingly, QuarkBase seems to offer the most accurate reporting for social popularity. quarkbase is a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from the internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc.

We expect a PR campaign to generate more brand searches and generic searches, this is easily compared with historical and seasonal data to demonstrate uplift. Specifically we look to measure, search inventory, CTR, leads and sales for brand and generic terms.

ROI: Harder to demonstrate direct ROI, however it is possible when using website conversion rate / revenue per user.

Pay Per Click Uplift

Understanding how online PR has increased the popularity of the organisation and its service in the search engines by increasing CTR and reducing CPC.

ROI: Historical data. Revenue from PPC following PR – Revenue from PPC prior to PR based on generic and brand keywords (comparing the same relative dates) = ROI.

Affiliate Marketing Uplift

Understanding how online PR has increased the popularity of the organisation and its service within the affiliate channel. Similar to PPC uplift, we expect a PR campaign to generate more brand searches and generic searches which will reach affiliate websites as well. The uplift is easily demonstrated by comparing historical and seasonal data to demonstrate uplift. Specifically we look to measure, impressions, clicks, sales, conversion rate, clickthrough rate and average EPC.

ROI: Historical data. Revenue from affiliate channel following PR – Revenue from affiliate channel prior to PR based (comparing the same relative dates) = ROI.

Blog and Forum Buzz

Understanding how online PR has increased the popularity of the organisation and its service in the blogs and forums. An effective way to determine a website’s popularity is by tracking its RSS feed subscriber trends. If a website uses feed burner, the leading provider of RSS feeds services – the matrix will use a “score” which is currently just a summation of the results found (useful for comparing social media website popularity of different websites).

ROI: Using analytics software, it’s easy to show revenue by source and link it back to the referring website or blog. The matrix suggests the more blog and forum buzz, the more sales the client will see. Of course negative buzz could also occur which might result in less or no sales from blogs and forums.

Website Backlinks Count and Analysis

Understanding how online PR has increased the number of links pointing to the organisation and its service. By using Yahoo Site Explorer and other tools, it’s possible to inspect aspects of a client’s URL. The “Inlinks” feature will show details about web pages that link back to the particular URL. By doing this, Site Explorer gives highly relevant insights on how popular a website is based on how many web pages are linking to it.

ROI: Comparing backlinks prior to PR and following PR based on URL keywords ranking. Then applying 80%, 60%, 40%, 20%, 10% search engine click heat map / conversion rate or using website analytics and again comparing dates.

Search Engine Page Index

Understanding how online PR has increased the number of organisation’s indexed pages. Number of index pages prior to PR compared with the number of pages following PR. Consider using a query like ” site:domain.com” which will show you a list of the number of pages indexed.

ROI: Revenue from new indexed pages according to analytics software.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 9:25 pm and is filed under e-commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.