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Q&A: How to measure the effectiveness of our online PR and viral campaigns

Author's avatar By Dave Chaffey 25 Jun, 2010
Essential Essential topic

Question: How should I measure online pr? I am trying to write my objectives for a marketing campaign.

Smart Insights Expert Answer: Thanks for your question - it's good to see you're going for SMART objectives...

While you may not be able to set specific goals for these, it's worth stating in the plan what you will be measuring, since then you can make sure you're tracking these measures and start to build up a library of the PR or buzz effectiveness of campaigns.

As for any goal-setting and measurement you can't stress enough how having clear goals (business specific) is the key, and that those goals are aligned to commercials.

I think it's always to break down campaign measures into goals of volume, quality and cost so for PR, the type of measures to consider are:

Volume

  • Number of mentions of brand or campaign name during the campaign
  • Incremental growth in Facebook Likes or Twitter follows
  • Backlinks created to your site from other sites during campaign

Quality

  • The volume can be assessed broken out by site type (e.g. blog, SNS, mainstream news media, etc) and quality (reach)
  • Quality of links can be assessed by site home page authority (PageRank), but PageRank of individual posts won't be updated in time
  • Number of incremental sales from links attributed to campaigns - this is only for direct links - increased awareness may generate other sales that can't be directly measured

Cost effectiveness

It's good to normalise the cost of your PR or link-building activities so you know the bang you get for your buck in future

  • The cost of the PR element of the campaign
  • Cost per mention, cost per link
  • Cost per response of clicks from these links that convert to lead or sale (will generally be relatively few of these)

Recommend setting goals for E-PR campaign of nMentions, Reach and Quality of Mentions, n,Q Backlinks and +IVE Sentiment

I hope that helps, good luck for your campaign. We also have these articles which may help with your campaign:

Author's avatar

By Dave Chaffey

Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.

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