In business, marketing, and advertising are essential. You need to tell your target audience who you are, what you do, and how well you do it. Commercials and ads are an important part of the process. Press releases are also helpful in many situations.
Tracking data about your press releases, their effectiveness, and the response of the public to them is also important. With the use of computers, the internet, and social media, the analysis of press release data has become more complex. Using software is the way to go as press release analytics are useful.
The Two Categories
The internet allows you access to accurate data concerning press releases. Using software to keep track of distribution analytics makes the process easier. You still need to understand what they are and how to use them. There are two basic categories of data.
Reach
This refers to data that tracks how many people are seeing your press release. It has three aspects.
- Impressions – This is simply the number of times your press release link has been seen by the public.
- Views – This refers to the actual number of individual views of the press release.
- Shares – The number of times the article has been shared on social media platforms is another important statistic.
Reach is just one part of the equation.
Engagement
The second category of press release distribution data is engagement. It tracks the number of people who are interacting with the release and also has three parts.
- Clicks – This is the number of times someone has clicked on your press release links.
- Time on the Page – Clicks don’t tell the whole story. This number lets you know on average, how long people are looking at the page. It can tell you if they are reading the entire press release.
- Conversions – This vital number lets you know how effectively the release is working. It tells you how many leads or sales have been generated by the article.
Knowing how people are reading and interacting with a press release is information that can help improve future articles to better achieve your goals.
The Importance of Understanding Press Analytics
Having your press release picked up by a media outlet is only the first step in the process. Just knowing it’s out there is not useful. You need to be able to use the analytics to know exactly how well your press releases are doing what you intended them to do. The marketplace is competitive and you can be certain your rivals are tracking analytics. To keep up and best them, you need to do the same.
The Importance of Key Analytics
Knowing the difference between what each key analytic represents will help you get the true picture of how well your press releases are working. Each tells a different part of the story.
- Impressions – Impressions are important but they are merely the number of times your release shows up in an internet search. It doesn’t mean the link was clicked on or that the searcher read the release.
- Clicks – A click lets you know that someone followed your link to the web page. It doesn’t mean the article was read.
- Click-through rate – An important number to know, the CTR is the percentage of people who clicked on your press release after viewing it.
- Bounce rate – Bouncing is when someone arrives at your site and immediately leaves. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who are doing this and if it’s high, you know you need to make adjustments.
Understanding key analytics is vital to using them properly and is a good reason to use software.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Press Releases
The purpose of collecting all of this data is to measure how effectively your press releases are working. Separating metrics into hard and soft ones helps to see the entire picture.
Hard metrics include how many media outlets picked up the release, their circulation numbers, and how many people are following links to the release. Soft metrics are those that pertain to increased brand awareness and positive reviews and customer comments. Each is important.
Press releases are an important part of your marketing campaigns. Using analytical data properly can help you increase their effectiveness. Given the complexity of this task, using good press release analytic software is highly recommended.
