BRIAN WRIGHT Senior Director of Communications Visit California
GLOBAL EARNED MEDIA MOMENTUM $500 million $400 million $300 million Paid Ad Value $200 million $100 million $ million Source: Visit California
MEASURING SUCCESS Which of these metrics do you use to evaluate your earned media programs? Web traffic Ad equivalency Impressions 0 20 40 60 63% yes 69% yes 88% yes 80 100 Source: Visit California PR Summit survey, 2013
MEASURING SUCCESS What is a justifiable ROI? How do you measure impact? Published articles but is this right?!? Is there a better way? What s everyone else doing? Are we doing it wrong? Can we all do it the same way????
SANDY MALLOY Senior Information Specialist Business Wire @BWInfodiva Sandy.malloy@businesswire.com
The Barcelona Principles 1. Importance of Goal Setting and Measurement 2. Measuring the Effect on Outcomes is Preferred to Measuring Outputs 3. The Effect on Business Results Can and Should Be Measured Where Possible 4. Media Measurement Requires Quantity and Quality 5. AVEs are not the Value of Public Relations 6. Social Media Can and Should be Measured 7. Transparency and Replicability are Paramount to Sound Measurement
The Barcelona Principles in 1. Set a goal. Period. Non-MEGO* Terms: 2. What does it mean?, not what did you produce? 3. See #2 4. Not how many clips but how many good clips? 5. AVE just don t. 6. Social media measurement yes. 7. Don t hide anything, and make sure you can repeat it. 8. BONUS: Can you use what you ve learned to plan future efforts? *MEGO= My eyes glaze over
BARCELONA PRINCIPLE #1: The Importance of Goal Setting and Measurement
Is this a goal?
How about this? Put out one press release per week.
How about this? Increase the number of registrations for our online MBA course by 2% in the first quarter of 2013 over the first quarter of 2012.
BARCELONA PRINCIPLE #2: Measuring the Effect on Outcomes is Preferred to Measuring Outputs
Outputs can, and should, support the measureable goal E.g.: Goal=Increase registrations Create press releases to drive traffic to registration website Other activities (e.g., contests promoted on social media) designed to drive even more traffic Count visits and conversion rate
The links in this release point to Web pages that are set up with Google Analytics to keep track of traffic and conversions (course registrations)
In this HGTV release, a call to action gives people a reason to click. Note incentives to connect on social media.
HGTV builds links to specific landing pages on their site related to the initiative they are trying to measure. That lets them track visitors to THAT PAGE not just their main website.
The HGTV Urban Oasis landing page
SO: What s so bad about AVE? AVE (Ad Value Equivalency) is the cost of media space. That s all it really measures. Even then, it s not accurate. Rack rates for ad values are often discounted, and multipliers are of dubious value. It does not inform future efforts.
What about clips? Counting clips is not measurement, but analyzing them can be Barcelona principle of quality vs. quantity applies Monitor and analyze both mainstream and social media
How to get the most out of media analysis: Consider benchmarks Consider share of voice Consider sentiment and messaging Consider community, for social media Consider audience engagement
So, to measure effectively, Set a goal you need to: Make everything you do support that goal Measure how close you came to the goal Take the results, see what worked and what didn t, and set the next goal Measure again
RESOURCES http://www.instituteforpr.org/research/commissions/ measurement/ (good information about AVE and alternatives) http://amecorg.com/resource-centre/ http://kdpaine.blogs.com/themeasurementstandard/ http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/white-papers/ (Rutgers study) http://www.prnewsonline.com http://www.ragan.com On Twitter: #prmeasurement