Evaluation of PR efforts is a massive issue within the industry; especially as it is hard to tell if efforts have reached their intended audiences.It's also hard to know what channels to concentrate on. However, online monitoring systems like Google Analytics have provided the means to easily discover who is visiting what websites and other useful information. I’ve been using it on this blog to discover who has been visiting mine.
Visits
First Google Analytics shows how many visitors my blog has had over time.
This shows that the blog has increased visits in the last few days and on what days it was visited. This would be very useful when doing a communications campaign as it would let you know if people increased their visits and would help assess if your website/blog was getting enough visits.
Other information;
This can help assess and design web content;
- New visits % helps determine if you're increasing your readership
- Avg Time indicates how to design content by suggesting how quickly information needs to be accessed.
Google Analytics can tell you far more than just frequency of visits; it can give you detailed information about the visitors such as their location and technical details.
Most of my visitors were from the UK,but I did get some visits from the US & Spain.
This could help to assess if you were reaching a target audience.
It tells me other information about visitors such as the systems and search engines they're using. Most people were using Windows.It showed me that 63% of visitors were using Firefox and 35% were using Chrome.
Other information such as screen colour and resolution are available too. All this information is useful; it can be used to ensure that the content on the website can be accessed by the users. It can also be used to create content and add-ons based on the browser capabilities.
Referral information
It also indicates where people come from to get to my blog and what search words were used. It showed me that most people came from blogger and no search words were found.
This would be very useful in evaluating your communication efforts on the internet and can indicate where you should concentrate your resources and time.
Problems
However, I’ve also noticed that Google Analytics' and Blogger's own ‘stats’ functions are different, which suggests that for clear understanding of web traffic a variety of monitoring system should be used.
Blogger suggests that I've had visitors from more countries such as Russia and South Korea.
Pictures from;
http://www.google.com/analytics/