I have a client that decided to send out a few press releases without getting me envolved. Now they want to know the effect of the press release. Did it increase traffic, etc.? Any ideas on what I can do at this point? Also, do you think PRWeb is the best press release mechanism?
We've had the PRweb debate over and over here. Search for it. As a PR professional, I believe very strongly that PRweb is very rarely the "best" option for anything... but whether it will work at all depends on the client's motivation and budget determining whether or not they can afford better distribution. However, if your client honestly believes press releases are all about traffic, then stick them to PRweb, b/c they won't understand paying more, or spending more time, for serious exposure. As this point you can't do anything but review their stats for referring sources, set up any alerts on their domain and release headline, or hire a clipping service if it's not too long ago.
The best thing is to look at the traffic stats and see where the referrals are coming from. If there was a live link included in the press release, it would very easy to track how much traffic you received from it.
That still won't tell them how much traffic came "as a result of" the release though if they had any legitimate pickups... traffic would be coming from a variety of sources, and not all end up including live links, which is why you also need a basic alert setup just for the text of the domain (theirname.com) to catch them.
Thanks. I am monitoring the stats. I may being thick here but will you elaborate on the "set up alerts on their domain and release headlines." There are no live links in the press release.
Set up Google / Yahoo alerts for the text of the url as it might be written in the release, even without livelinks (and on all searches; not just news). Do the same with the alert set for the title of the release to pick up every occurance where someone simply reposted it, rather than writing a unique story, which is what they're supposed to do.