Recognize The Importance Of Mining and Minding Your Press Release Data
How much do you know about your press release analytics? How well do you track and analyze the data? These two steps, mining and minding your data, can make a significant difference in your press release marketing success.
What is Data Mining?
First, let’s define data mining. It’s the practice of reviewing large collections of data or information to generate new information. A simple example might be the comparison of two social media analytics. You might review shares and what the click-throughs from social media do on your website. What pages do they click through to once they’ve clicked away from your landing page? By evaluating this information you might realize that shares from press releases on new products or services generate longer stays on your website and more page views.
Why Mine Data? What Are the Benefits?
We often tend to look at data in a linear fashion. We look at the number of views of a press release, for example, and focus on improving that number. However, by taking a deeper look at the data, you may learn new information about those views. You might realize that the views weigh heavy in one region of the country. This information could help you tweak the content to appeal more to other regions, to segment your press release marketing, or to focus on that power region specifically. Essentially, data mining gives you more information to make better press release marketing decisions.
When Do You Evaluate the Data and How?
One of the biggest challenges may not be gathering the data. Your press release distribution service, along with your analytics program (such as Google Analytics), likely provide you with all of the information you need. The trick is to create a system of organizing the data and analyzing it.
Look for Relationships
Initially, you may spend some time exploring the data and looking for potential relationships. Once you find them, graphing or charting the information can help you better explore correlations. When you find positive correlations between two or more variables, that information needs to be organized for future use. Spreadsheets are one simple way to organize the information. You may use the data for future planning, including setting benchmarks and press release marketing goals.
It’s useful to know that Google Analytics also provides some relationship analysis tools. You’re able to compare charts and tables and explore relationships between two or more variables. Google also does a good job of making it easy to extract the data you need and save the information.
Determine the key variables for your press releases. What metrics are you measuring? What are your goals? Then explore the relevant analytics. The relationships you find may be able to help you create a stronger press release marketing campaign.
