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Easter break + more or less nice weather = travel time!? If you were lucky you might have spend some days away from home. Wouldn’t it be a strange idea if every step of this journey would have been observed by someone? I think so. But there is one particular journey on which it can be very beneficial to keep an eye. Any idea? I think about the customer’s journey on a corporate website.

Web analytics tools like Google analytics, Omniture, Hitwise and Web Trends make it possible to track what is going on on a corporate website or corporate blog. This is especially helpful if the target of an online PR campaign is to drive traffic to these websites. The web analytics tools make it easy to identify where the traffic came from, for instance.

Keyword: online evaluation

But analyzing a corporate website is just one thing – the online environment provides other interesting opportunities to evaluate the success of PR work, too, of course! Just think about blogs, for instance: Regarding the corporate blog you can easily get an idea of how many people are engaging with the company by looking at the frequency of comments. Counting the volume of conversations, comments and track backs to the corporate blog is one option to evaluate it. Another possibility is ‘The Conversation Index’ developed by Stowe Boyd. This index measures the degree to which a blog generated conversation. Additionally bookmarking sides like Technorati or Kineda are helpful tools to measure a blog as the rank blogs according to their popularity.

The challenge of the online environment

Doubtlessly, the online environment gives versatile chances to measure online PR activity. The mentioned tools are just one part of an interesting, new working field (if you’d like to get a deeper insight into it, why not read my fellow student Jennifer’s or Sam’s blog). Nevertheless, I think it is important to keep in mind that the exploration of the online world requires a large dose of common sense, a structured approach and enough knowledge of the technologies that are available to help, too!

Anyway, I’ll set off for another virtual journey now! If I get across interesting PR topics, I will let you know, for sure!