In my time in college I have had it ingrained in my brain over and over again that content is king in public relations and advertising. If your content isn’t appealing then your audience won’t read your brochure or stay on your website. Thanks to tools now available like Google Analytics, content management is becoming easier than ever. Google analytics can even be installed on many blogging sites including WordPress and blogger. After reading chapter 11 in Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals, “The Business of Blogging,” it helped me realize just how useful Analytics could really be in order to have a successful blog for yourself and for a business.
For those who don’t know what Google Analytics is, in short, it’s a free tool for tracking site statistics but most users never get, “…more than just a pretty interface with interesting graphs,” (50 Resources for getting the most out of Google Analytics) out of Analytics because it can be a bit complicated to fully utilize and understand. Thankfully there are blogs like Kissmetrics who have compiled a list of articles and how-to guides for Analytics beginners all the way through those ready to try new and advanced features.
A lot of what was discussed in chapter 11 of Share This can be utilized even more effectively when using tools like Analytics. For example, the search engine optimization (SEO) of a particular site can be studied under analytics. With Analytics it is possible to view the, “…top referring search terms that drove Web traffic to your site,” (How to use Analytics to Create Killer Content). Once those keywords have been discovered, other tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can be used to, “…identify related keywords, as well as highlight High Search/Low Competition keywords,” (How to use Analytics to Create Killer Content). High Search/Low Competition keywords allow an opportunity for a specific site or blog post to place highly among those search terms. In essences, it is terms that are searched frequently but don’t wield a lot of competitive results.
Google Analytics allows users to keep the data it produces as simple or as in-depth as they desire making it one of the ultimate tools for tracking your blog or website and understanding how to utilize that data in order to create better audience engagement and more website traffic.
Brown, D. (n.d.). How To Use Google Analytics To Create Killer Content | OPEN Forum. OPEN Forum Site Wide Activity RSS. Retrieved October 28, 2013, from https://www.openforum.com/articles/how-to-use-google-analytics-to-create-the-ultimate-content/
CIPR. (2013). Share This Too: More social media solutions for PR professionalsCIPR.. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Kissmetrics. (n.d.). 50 Resources for Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics. Kissmetrics. Retrieved October 28, 2013, from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/50-resources-for-getting-the-most-out-of-google-analytics/
Alissa Petsche 
Google analytics seems like it could help a lot of companies and journalist see how much of an impact they had on the public. I think it could be a great tool to keep track of how much publicity your site and blog are really receiving. It could help learn what is working for the audience and what isn’t.
Google analytics is a great tool for all the reasons you listed. To go along with that, its a tool all PR professionals should keep in mind. Many organizations want hard facts that prove a PR professionals efforts. Google analytics is a solid tool to measure one’s efforts and success. This measurement is a crucial part of an evaluation (a step in the PR Process).