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 ...

Of all things that could potentially contribute to the financial value of a company’s brand, including product quality, customer service, and R&D, public relations has been one of the least studied and understood. We recently conducted a study to take a closer look at the role that public relations plays in building brand value by assessing the statistical relationship between media prominence (a measure of prominence of mentions in unpaid media) and brand value for the 100 companies in Interbrand’s ...

Context Analytics was recently asked to explore the relationship between a client’s media coverage and the traffic to their consumer facing web site, to see how effective their PR efforts were in driving revenue-producing traffic. We also looked at their closest competitors to benchmark the results. We used web analytics data (such as # of monthly visitors) and combined that with data on product-related coverage we already analyze for the client on a quarterly basis. We repeated this process for each ...