By Gini Dietrich

Yesterday, when we were having a fun debate in the comments on my AVEs blog post, it occurred to me that—while you have that massive PR metrics blog post to show different types of data to use—it might be helpful to see how to track something very specific.

So specific you shall have.

We have a client who has a $100,000 revenue goal for this year…from our efforts, alone.

It’s easier to track because it’s all online and we have access to two tools: Infusionsoft and Google Analytics.

It wasn’t easy, but we got their eCommerce set up in Infusionsoft (which we jokingly call Confusionsoft or Infusionhard) so we know exactly how much we’ve generated by day.

Then, to create our metrics, we had to work backwards.

We began working with them last July so we had five months of data to pull from to give us a baseline for our metrics (next year will be much easier because we’ll have more than a year’s worth of data).

How to Measure PR

Here is what we knew:

• We had 55 buyers in five months last year and they averaged $551.87.
• Our conversion rate from person entering the website to buyer was 1.47%.
• Our goal this year was set at $100,000.
• This meant we had to get 20,000 new people to come to the site and work through the funnel.
• With a 1.47% conversion, our goal is to have 294 new active users (which actually puts us at $162,250).

Now, that said, there also is a goal to increase the conversion rate (businesses like this one tends to have a 3% or higher conversion), but we were working on data just from the last part of last year.

If we do that and still work on the 20,000 community number, we have 600 new active users, or $331,122.

There are lots of ways to look at metrics, but we decided to work solely from the data we had from last year, and not from projections.

Weekly Metrics

To track against our new revenue goal, we look weekly at the following:

• Community (blog and website visitors and social media followers);
• Subscribers (anyone who has given us an email address through newsletter or blog subscription, free downloads, or a starter kit);
• Members (attendees at speaking gigs or workshops, taken free trial all the way through); and
• Active users (anyone who has purchased something).

The 20,000 metric sits in the community goal, but we had to add it to last year’s community number.

In other words, that number was at 17,000 last year so our goal is 37,000 this year.

To create actual numbers to track, we had to look at conversions from last year:

• Community to subscriber was 29%
• Subscriber to member was 11%
• Member to active user was 25%

So, to look at the conversion percentage from community to subscribers; subscribers to members; members to active users; and community to active users (this is what we want to increase from 1.47%), we had to create the following annual goals:

• Community: 37,000 (the 17,000 from last year + the 20,000 goal for this year)
• Subscriber: 10,730 (29% of the community number)
• Member: 1,180 (11% of the subscriber number)
• Active user: 295 (25% of the member number)

And, of course, we look at revenue generated.

To give us a stretch goal (beyond the $100,000 the CEO set), we take the active user goal and multiply it by $551.87.

So our goal is $162,802.

Integrating PESO Into the Metrics

On the back-end, we also track how many of the community and subscribers are coming from earned media efforts and what percentage they are of the total conversions.

It’s significant—in the 60th percentile.

This tells us, of the 20,000 new community members we’re expecting this year, 12,000 of them will come from earned media efforts.

The rest come from social media campaigns, from blogging and amplification of that content, and from speaking engagements.

You can see that we have the full PESO model covered on the front-end:

• Paid through social advertising and email automation;
• Earned through media relations;
• Shared through social media and community management; and
• Owned through blogging, LinkedIn Pulse, and Medium.

Then, as people go through the funnel from community to subscriber to member, they go into a pretty aggressive marketing automation workflow that leads them to becoming an active user…and our gold star: Revenue.

Monitor, Tweak, Improve

I’m not going to sit here and pretend it was easy to figure all of this out or that it was easy to get Infusionsoft to report the way we needed it to on a dashboard.

And we tweak constantly.

I’ll bet I’m in Infusionsoft, myself, at least five times a day looking at the data and pulling reports against certain campaigns.

But, once we got it all set up, it became really easy to monitor, tweak, and improve.

Now that it’s all set up, our job is to execute on the program and make sure we’re hitting weekly and monthly goals that lead to the larger annual goals.

There will be changes along the way and things we certainly didn’t expect, but that, my friends, is how you measure PR.

image credit: shutterstock