Here are some examples of questions that Web analytics can help you answer:

• Is our corporate Twitter account driving traffic to the right Web pages?
• Are our press releases or social media releases being cited by journalists and bloggers, and if so, do they drive traffic to our corporate site?
• Is Key Message A more effective at driving sales than Key Message B?
• Should we invest more resources in social or traditional media?
• Where do we find the audiences most likely to respond to our campaigns?

While some of these questions require advanced analysis and statistics, there are many straightforward questions you can ask your internal Web analytics team for data on:

• For starters, get some data on what unpaid sites drive the most traffic to your Web site. Unpaid traffic includes any Web sites that provide a link to you for which you have not paid (i.e., not ads or paid search). Many of these sites are influential publications that publish content about your brand, so you should know who is most effective at driving awareness and demand.
• Next, ask questions about what the traffic that these sites refer looks like. Do they tend to sign up for information or buy things on the Web site (or to put in Web analytics speak: “how well do they convert?”). Where are they located geographically? What keywords did they use to find the information, if any (this is great input into determining how you should write copy about your company)?
• Then you may want to do some benchmarking. How does earned media compare to paid media? How does Twitter compare to blogs?

Your internal Web analytics team should be able to provide you some of these reports out of the system or provide you or your analyst of choice access to the application. You can also talk to your agency or research vendor who can help answer your questions on how to get started. We frequently get asked by clients to do this and also help answer complex questions such as: what messaging results in more sales? Where are the untapped audiences with the most potential? Which audience segments should you target with various messages to get optimal business outcomes? There are many ways you can use the data to give you campaign insights, and if you combine it with other data sources, the possibilities are vast.

For more information on the subject of how to get started using Web analytics for PR, you should also take a look at this presentation, which Context Analytic’s Seth Duncan gave at IPR’s Measurement Summit recently:

1) Which blogs are driving mainstream media content?

2) When are blogs cited?

3) Why do journalists cite blogs?

We chose to answer the “which blogs are driving mainstream media content” question by creating a ranking system based on the number of citations each blog received in mainstream media over the past two years. We chose this method, as it parallels one of the key indicators of influence in social media (linking relationships), and the results of this research can be found in the full Power 50 report.

There are a few surprises in the rankings (who expected that icanhascheezburger would be cited by mainstream media more often than GigaOm?). But, I think that the rankings will probably confirm what many have suspected all along—“influence” in the blogosphere is mostly concentrated among a handful of well-known political and technology blogs. Perhaps the most surprising result of the rankings is just how concentrated that influence is. The top three blogs, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Politico, alone account for 44% of all traditional media citations among the top 50 influential blogs.

 Readers of the final report will find that the answer to the “when and why do journalists cite blogs” questions depend on the blog type. Political, gossip and business blogs are usually cited as primary sources. News breaks on the blog and the blog is cited as a source of information, but the blogger is rarely mentioned and hardly ever quoted. Technology and Lifestyle blogs, however, are often cited as secondary sources.  News rarely breaks on these blogs and instead of being cited for content; the bloggers are quoted and treated as industry experts. We think this finding is particularly useful for PR professionals, because it suggests that political and gossip blogs should be thought of as “newswires” while technology and lifestyle bloggers resemble industry analysts in the way they add opinion and/or insight.

On a final note, it’s important to remember that, although the Power 50 blogs appear to be gaining influence in mainstream media (45% year-over-year increase in citations from 2007 to 2008), these blogs are not cited nearly as frequently as mainstream media sources. In fact, even relatively small regional papers, such as the Arizona Republic and San Jose Mercury are cited more often than the Huffington Post. Interestingly, even other blogs are far more likely to cite mainstream media sources. A quick search in Technorati reveals, for example, that the New York Times is cited twice as often in blogs as the most cited blog, Engadget. So, while it’s true that blogs are increasingly becoming trusted sources of news and analysis among journalists and bloggers, one should not forget that conversations in social media most often are sparked by mainstream media. While social media helps amplify, drive and add color to those discussions, any communications strategy needs to think about all media as a whole. Ultimately, the key to unlocking this is to understand key influencers – be they in mainstream or social media. This report provides one viewpoint on influence and data can be interpreted many ways. I’d love to hear your opinions on influence in the blogosphere.

Go here for the full report.

- Seth Duncan, Context Analytics