PRWeb offers solid analytics – whether you’re buying one off releases from PRWeb.com, or a bundle of releases in addition to the Vocus PR Suite or the Vocus Marketing Suite – the fundamentals of the analytics are the same.

The analytics will give you a summary and the ability to drill down to see where your release was sent, which outlets published the content, impressions, reads, interactions and traffic sources.

My two favorite metrics are reads and the interactions.

Reads. Reads are a great metric because it works just like page views for blog analytics.  From the screenshot nearby, you can see one release we distributed had more than 4,600 page reads – which is phenomenal.  When I started in PR many years ago at a PR firm, reaching a community of that size came by way of pitching a targeted trade publication, only a little better.

It’s better because many of these readers come through search.  As Lee Odden, whose firm consults for us, writes in his book, Optimize, search is an expression of need or want.  The optimized PRWeb release affords the chance to reach a prospect at the precise time they are expressing the need through search.  It’s transformed the press release from a tool for mass communication that Ivy Lee conceived 106 years ago, and transformed it into a tool for targeted marketing. 

Interactions. Secondly, interactions are an important metric because it’s an indication that a reader found the content so engaging – they did something with it.  That may mean social sharing, forwarding it by email or turning it into a PDF, printing it off and placing it on their boss’s desk. In the screen shot nearby you can see a press release we’ve issued, had more than 1,300 interactions.  This means roughly one quarter of all the people that read didn’t just read and click away, they did something with it!

Another solid metric that many savvy web marketers use is Google Analytics.  These analytics are used to monitor and measure traffic on web properties, like a Web site or a blog.  You can easily see the traffic driven to your web property from your press release.

For customers using the Vocus Marketing Suite, you can actually plug your analytics right into your dashboard so you can get an at-a-glance view across all of your online marketing activities, including social media.  Here’s a great article on the product and the approach to integrated marketing that will tell you more.

Note:  If you’re interested in testing out one of these other products, we’re offering a free trial of the social component, Vocus Social Marketing, right now.

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Filed under: Tips and Tricks, User Experience by Frank Strong