As with any offsite but online transaction, it can be difficult to measure it’s effectiveness. For example, it can be difficult to measure true ROI on banners where you pay a CPM cost.
The same can hold true for press releases. That is, you pay the editorial cost of submission and wait for the referrals, but it is sometimes difficult to track them. However PRWeb does provide some basic statistics. When you implement conversion tracking along with PRWeb statistics you can begin to understand the effectiveness of your releases.
Once you have submitted the press release and it has been approved by an editor, simply log into the account created earlier and scroll down the page slightly to see the exposure statistics in the lower right of the screen:
One can click on the “more details” link to receive more detailed information on these numbers:
From here one can see what the various numbers mean. Below is a description of each
number:
Reads – This number tells you how many times your press release was accessed from the PRWeb.com site and other distribution points where they have the ability to measure a click through. This number does not include the number of journalists that have received your release through email. In addition there are online distribution points that PRWeb.com currently has no ability to track.
Estimated Pickup – This number estimates the number of times your press release was picked up by a media outlet. This does not tell you how many times your story appears in the media. It simply attempts to estimate media interest of your release.
Prints – This is the number of times that someone has printed your press release. This is measured by the number of times that the “printer friendly version” link is pressed. In reality, only a small percentage of users actually click this link before printing a release.
Forwards – This is the number of times that someone has forwarded your press release to a third party using the link on your press release.
PDF Downloads – The number of times your release was downloaded as a PDF document. PDF Downloads may be reflected in “Reads” and “Estimated Pickup” statistics.
How To Track Effectiveness
So now that you understand how to view the PRWeb stats, let’s look at how to track the effectiveness of your releases.
When you contribute a higher amount for PRWeb you are given the ability to embed text links in your release. That means you can insert important keywords and then link off those phrases to your website.
While this can be an effective way to build link popularity it can be difficult to track clicks coming from the releases to your site.
One option would be to set up a tracking campaign to track all links clicked. Different analytics use different means to do this, but even if you just run logfiles you can quickly filter press release referrals.
For example, appending the URL’s found in the press release with something to identify them as PR clicks (ie www.mysite.com?source=PRWeb) you can then use your analytics/logfile parser to find all the clicks where “source=” is appended.
Then, add up the clicks and divide by your cost and voila – basic return calculations for your press release.
However, if you also want to track sales or other statistics you will need to ensure your analytics will track them. But again, an ecommerce enabled analytics should be able to provide you a referrer report which can track back to the URL with the “source=” string.
From here the calculations are similar (if the analytics won’t do it for you).
Ultimately, tracking performance of press releases should be no different than any other sponsored campaign. Whether you use some analytics such as Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst or even WebTrends basic log analysis you should be able to at least estimate your return on the press release investment.
Short of that an informal poll conducted by you or your sales staff (“how did you hear about us?”) may help shed some light on whether the press release was effective.
