If your reaction to the headline was, “what on earth does Web analytics have to do with my job?” you probably weren’t alone. Web analytics might be thought of as the realm of SEO pros and online marketing teams, but it can be an incredibly valuable tool for PR teams too. In fact, Web analytics can give you insight into the value of PR and the types of business outcomes it helps drive in a way that hasn’t been possible ...

Communications professionals are becoming increasingly savvy about digital media, but far too few companies take the opportunity to tie their PR efforts to business outcomes that can easily be measured through web analytics (e.g., website traffic, new business leads, white paper downloads, online sales, etc.). One big reason is that even the best enterprise web analytics solution can't achieve this on its own. Out-of-the-box reports from Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, etc., will tell you what blogs and news sites are driving traffic and engagement at ...

Forrester and Google announced the results of their study on trends in enterprise web analytics yesterday and the results suggest that companies are starting to realize that analysts, not software, produce useful insights. The study, which surveyed the web analytics decision makers at 198 companies with annual revenues of at least $500 million, found that 60% of respondents believe that web analytics analysts are more valuable than software and that 52% prefer free tools because it allows them to invest ...

The topic of emotional loyalty has been a topic of interest for us for a while, as it gives tantalizing clues to decoding what it is about certain brands that give them a halo effect in media coverage, and how to ascribe value to that intangible asset. This halo gives them the ability to defy gravity by trading at multiples in the stock market not necessarily explained by financial ratios; garner share of voice percentages that are out of proportion ...

We were curious to read the recently published study correlating social media engagement and financial performance for the world’s 100 most valuable brands (per Interbrand), published by the Altimeter Group and WetPaint, since it covers an issue we are particularly interested in: how do you link a brand’s social media activities to bottom-line results? To add to our interest, the study used very similar methodology to the one we used in a study we released earlier this year, where we ...