20 May 2016
Did you know that you can use Google Analytics (GA) to measure and prove the value of PR and social media activity?
Here are a few tips for getting started. First of all a GA account needs to be set up with client and agency access. The way the tracking works is that GA uses cookies for page tagging.
There is quite a lot of GA account set up admin, but once done you’re on the path to discovery! If you already have a GA account you can run a simple check using www.checkmyanalytics.com. Importantly you need to set the Search Console Account ( was called Webmaster tools account) as this enables keyword tracking. This is vital as keywords embedded in press material will link back to GA for future analysis. You also need to establish ‘goals’ in the admin section and filters to exclude traffic for instance from employees and partners, etc. Then you need to configure campaign tracking where you can exclude traffic from email and social media if required.
Next comes setting up Google URL builder to generate URLs for campaign tracking. Try www.cardinalpath.com which gives you a free spreadsheet for URLs generated.
Once this is all set up, the ‘reporting’ section of GA provides everything you need under sub sections of audience overview, demographics, benchmarking, user flows, acquisition, overview, adwords, seo, social, campaigns, behaviour, site speed, site search and events.
There are loads more features of GA to play with. A-B testing can be done under ’experiments’, and there is in-page analytics. Conversions allows you to see results against goals set; ecommerce shows product performance; multi channel funnels show top conversions; and real time gives an overview of locations and traffic. Intelligence events show what’s performing on the site; dashboards can be set up to show and share what’s going on; and customisation is there to create and save custom reports.
It is quite amazing how much depth of information and evaluation of campaigns is allowed through GA. We hope all of this is helpful with your B2B PR. All the best with your set up and monitoring! If you would like to know more, go to the CIPR website and download the PDF on Google Analytics for PR Measurement and Evaluation.
