Nobody would disagree that linking your online PR coverage to the impact on a client’s website is a valuable thing to do.
- Did anyone visit our site from the link in that coverage?
- Did anybody that visited…actually do anything. Like download something, give us their email or earn us some money?
You can get answers to this stuff with Google Analytics.
But so few PR people use this data. Why?
In my experience many PR teams (both in-house and agency) just don’t get given access to Google Analytics accounts. Mostly because they don’t ask for it. Or don’t know how to.
Stella Bayles says:
I recommend beginning with the SEO team. As well as gaining analytics access, a good PR and SEO relationship can bring additional benefits to each other and the overall business too. You can read more on that here.
It’s not just a lack of communication between PR and digital marketing that can block analytics access. There can also be a concern that elements of the analytics set-up such as goals or filters might accidentally be altered.
There could also be a worry of confidential data being shared outside the business too.
This is one of the reasons why we created the free tool AnswerTheClient.com
Absolutely nothing can be changed in analytics from AnswerTheClient.com and all of the data remains confidential. It simply extracts the referral traffic from your PR coverage only. Nowhere else. Not only does it help save you time it will also reassure the rest of the internal digital teams that the data is safe too.
Use this email template to ask for permission:
To help get that access even quicker I’ve put together an email template you can use to kick-off that journey and help set reassurance.
Dear xx
I work in the XX PR team. We are constantly striving to gain business insights from our PR campaigns so we can tweak and improve to ultimately increase business impact in the future. In order to do this we would like to view the referral traffic and any goals met from our PR coverage.
We therefore need access to site analytics to do so.
If XX site has Google analytics set-up we would like to use a tool called AnswerTheClient.com. It’s great because there is no danger of us being able to change, amend or adapt any goals or filters. We would also ONLY be able to view the referral traffic from PR coverage URLs and any goal achievements off the back of that traffic.
However, if for any reason we do want the tool to read the data we can cancel through Google permissions here.
Please add the following email address to the XX Google analytics account.
The data we gain from the tool will only be used as part of PR reporting and insights for our team. Nothing will be shared externally.
Finally, it would be great to further discuss analytics goals with you. We’re keen to introduce them as PR KPIs in the future.
Best XX
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Once you have been given access you can dig deeper into the analytics of your client if you wish.
But if Analytics data is new to you then our free tool answetheclient.com could be a good place to start.
Andrew Smith likes it. Which is very cool. And he trains PR people on this stuff — https://www.cipr.co.uk/training/google-analytics-pr
“ Answer The Client is an ingenious little tool that makes the process of gaining insight into the value of press coverage related web traffic as easy as possible.”
Connect your Google Analytics account and paste in your coverage URLs, and lo and behold — an immediate snapshot of how much coverage traffic was generated, as well as any goal and/or transaction value created. Certainly a lot easier than trying to sift out press coverage from general referral traffic in GA by hand. And it’s free. What’s not to like?”
See also:
I also wrote this article on a beginners guide to Google Analytics for PR. You might like it.
Finally:
If you found this article useful you’ll love this. Are you drowning in “fun” PR admin tasks?
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