In the early days, it’s hard to measure the success of a press release. Companies don’t have exact key performance indicators to know if their content marketing succeeds or not.
Although a press release distribution company that you hired offer you metrics to show how your releases have performed, it’s better if you have your own tracking reports. The true measurement of success is through the amount of earned media.
Check out the following metrics that can help you measure the success of your content:
- Social media mentions.
Social mentions take place when a brand, keyword or hashtag is used on social media. They are categorized according to engagement, sentiment and social media channels.
One way to know how successful your content tactic is to measure your social media mentions. Were you mentioned on different social media channels like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?
Set up Twitter alerts to receive notifications that your brand or your products were mentioned on Twitter. Social mentions are driving force to generate leads and promote brand awareness.
To determine your social mentions, monitor the number of reach, sentiment and engagement. Reach is the number of people who were exposed to your brand or products.
Sentiment refers to the proportion of positive to negative posts about your company. Engagement pertains to the number of likes, comments and shares that your content received.
- Number of media coverage.
It is the oldest PR metric that denotes the amount of publicity that your content received. It includes the number of placements that your content generated online, broadcast or print.
What media and news publications picked up your story? Did you get media coverage from your target journalists and outlets? Set your Google Alerts to ensure that you will be notified once your brand name is mentioned.
- Geo-impact.
It is important to take note which geographical location did your news reach. Do you have new leads from different areas and countries?
- Search traffic data.
You want to make sure that you know how much traffic is brought by your distribution channel to your website or blog. It’s also important to have knowledge about the entire traffic that is brought by your content.
Track the sites that link to your site. You should know how many visitors landed on your site during your campaign.
If you use different distribution services, you may track their performance in Google Analytics dashboard. It gives you an idea which one is really effective and which gave you more traffic.
- The amount of conversion rates and landing page analytics.
Online Business Press releases have links that land to different pages. Although a release is not a direct promotional tool, you may use it to generate email list sign ups, free consultation requests, whitepaper or eBook downloads and product demo downloads.
Use analytics tools to monitor the number of activities generated by your releases. It’s how you can see if it is really effective in bringing traffic, according to eReleases.
- Search rankings.
Another method to see if your releases are doing well is to track the rankings of your targeted keywords. If you follow the different techniques in enhancing the SEO value of your content, you’ll likely see a boost in your search engine ranking soon.
These 6 metrics are useful to check if your releases for your technology company are performing well or not. In order to have a successful content marketing campaign, ensure that you focus on your business goals.
Don’t forget to follow the best practices for writing, pitching and distributing your releases. If done well, you should see a big improvement in your campaign results.
