So, you have successfully written and distributed your press release, do you think your work has ended? Find out more ways to measure press release effectiveness.
Your work for the press release campaign does not end after its distribution but continues with measuring the effectiveness of the campaign. If you want to secure success every time you distribute a PR, you must learn from the key metrics and analytics that help to find key insights regarding the campaign. You can take help of the PR analytics and online tools to have a more accurate idea of where your PR campaign can gain maximum attention. If you want to measure press release effectiveness in simple ways, here are seven of them.
1. Media Pickups
For starters, you can get a lot of insights from the media pickups you get for your PR. Based on the number, spread, reach, and quality of the pickups you can easily understand which aspects you need to work on for securing more media exposure. Check the number for print pickups and also indexed pickups to understand how well your PR is performing in the distribution network. While the quality of pickups can be challenging most times, you can still get a lot of reach and visitors for it.
2. Follow-up Stories
Follow-up stories are great for securing extra attention from the niche target audiences. When the journalists or editors want to take things a step further and publish a follow-up story; it creates a more detailed piece which allows for gaining more organic exposure from the market.
3. Mention on Social Media and Public Sentiment
Another great way of securing press release success is to check how much trending the topic is on social media. Most online users are active on social media and information becomes trendy based on their sentiment about the topic. That is how most content goes viral these days. When a PR is written on a trending topic can secure more attention by resonating with the target audiences. Mentions on social media are also a good way to measure it.
4. Site Visits
After distributing your press release, you can expect a spike in web traffic as more visitors will come to the business website. Checking the website stats can ensure that more users are getting interested in your business. However, it might not happen always. You need to closely monitor whenever the web traffic spikes as those can be considered as ‘good’ or ‘positive’ increases. This way you can figure out which PRs of you are working the best for the niche target audiences.
5. Backlinks
The number of backlinks also plays a huge role in securing success for press release distribution. The links that are included in the PR that take readers back to your business website are known as backlinks that redirect users. It is related to web traffic, site visits, and link clicks which help to bring more online engagement. Backlinks are highly valued as they are the main ingredient of search engine optimization or SEO practices. You can track the number of backlinks along with the quality and credibility of the sources to understand where your press release efforts are becoming fruitful and offer effective results over time.
6. Referral Web Traffic
Site referrals can be considered as a subset of overall web traffic when users directly come to your website from another website without using any intermediate link. Google also tracks referrals and their sources which helps the website rank top in the algorithm. You can check the metric yourself and figure out which topics in the PR is making the most impact of inviting users from outside.
7. Inclusion in News Aggregator
Modern-day news goes beyond traditional broadcasting through radio, television, and newspapers. In this digital era, news aggregators for various search engines help to get access to the latest news and other information. Count the number of times your press release has been featured on aggregators like Google News, Bing News, Yahoo News, Apple News, News360, and many others. Getting featured on these popular platforms can help to gain a large number of potential customers.
Final Thoughts
After writing and distribution, make sure to measure press release success to make your next distribution even more successful. Ensure to hire PR agencies who offer detailed analytical reports after the end of the campaign.
