Tackling Quantitative PR Measurement with AirPR & Google Analytics

The following is a guest post by Leta Soza. Leta is the PR Engineer at AirPR where she lives and breathes PR strategy, content marketing, community cultivation, and analytics. Her analytics adoration stems from the firmly rooted belief that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, so bring on the data. She works with everyone from Fortune 500 companies to innovative startups in order to assist them in proving the ROI of their PR efforts while optimizing their strategies. 

It’s no secret that PR has historically been difficult to measure… quantitatively that is.

PR pros have always had to rely on less than stellar metrics (AVEs, impressions calculations, etc.) to show ROI, and with seemingly no viable reporting alternatives, PR has basically been relegated to the budgetary back seat.

For years, the industry has struggled to prove its value, lagging behind in technological innovation. But as every aspect of business becomes driven by data, vanity metrics are becoming unacceptable and PR is being held accountable for demonstrating its impact on the bottom line.

At AirPR, we’ve made it our mission to provide analytics, insights, and measurement solutions for the rapidly evolving PR industry. Our Analyst product focuses on increasing overall PR performance while seeking to solve systemic industry challenges through the application of big data.

Analyst, our measurement and insights solution, was created to assist PR and communication professionals in understanding what’s moving the needle in terms of their business objectives. 

Interested in how many potential customers came to your website from that press hit? Curious which authors drove the most social amplification during a specific quarter? Want to more deeply understand message pull-through or even attribute revenue? Analyst simplifies getting these answers.

One of the key features of Analyst is our unique integration with Google Analytics. Our integration arms Analyst users with a comprehensive snapshot of the PR activities driving business objectives, as well as the insights to understand the media placements (earned or owned) that are achieving specific company aims, giving PR professionals a single dashboard dedicated to displaying the performance of their efforts. Completing the GA integration creates a comprehensive view of the most meaningful and actionable PR data in aggregate which then allows users to click into any piece of data for more context. 
AirPR Analyst Dashboard (click for full-sized image)

In PR attribution is key, so we leverage Google Analytics data in order to display PR-specific performance and demonstrate ROI. Our aim: To change the way the industry thinks about PR analytics, insights, and measurement and to provide the solutions that support this shift. 

To quote legendary management consultant Peter Drucker, “In this new era of ‘big data’ it is even more important to convert raw data to true information.” Our goal is to deliver actionable and meaningful information. When decision makers understand what’s working, they can increase effort on certain aspects, eliminate others, and make impactful budget allocation decisions for future PR campaigns, much like they do for advertising.

To learn more about AirPR Analyst, check us out in the Google Analytics app gallery.

Posted by Leta Soza, PR Engineer at AirPR