Digital PR: How PR can benefit from UTM tag
Being a Public Relations professional today is really challenging. Challenges come from all angles, from new media to digital marketing and all kinds of analytics and measurement methods.
Old fashioned PR people don’t like that, they think that all the Public Relations efforts can be measured by opinion pools and surveys. And that is somewhat correct, to have a good understanding of your brand position, you need to ask people about it.
Simple way to measure a success of press release
In the world of digital media, it is not enough to obtain your press release published. And we are not talking about native ads or sponsored stories / articles. We are talking about granted press release, published on the media for free.
Let’s say, you have your press release ready to send out to your journalist list.
We hope that you send your press release in a word document (so journalists can open them and edit them), with some photos, or if you have high resolution photos, then in some kind of a cloud document with an URL in the email.
Next thing is URL’s, provide URL’s for the journalists, so they can find more information on your clients/company web site. And now, we are coming to UTM tags. UTM tags (sometimes called UTM codes) are simple way to track traffic coming to your website.
How can you tell if an published press release on The Economist is better for you than in The Guardian?
With the simple use of Campaign URL Builder by Google Analytics.
First you visit the URL Builder — LINK
Then you fill up this form:
Explanation:
– Website URL: Here you put the url where you want readers to come on your website — for example https://zriha.consulting/
– Campaign Source: Here you can name the media that will be publishing your PR — for example The Guardian , or you can just name the media that you are sending with, in this case — email.
– Campaign Medium: Well, you are sending Press Release, then called it like that
– Campaign Name: This place is creative, call it as you like. You will see this name in your Google Analytics account.
Then you get this big URL code, and you put it in the press release and an email for The Guardian.
Something like this: https://zriha.consulting/#utm_source=Blog_Post&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=test_utm_blog_post_url
After that, you repeat this process and create as much URL’s as you need for your whole journalist list.
Finally, you will see in your Google Analytics account how much people visited your website from different media that published your press release, and not only that, if you have come kind of conversion goals setup on your website, you will even see that.
