Core Features of Modern PR Tools

Most solutions cover three basic functions: media monitoring of news sites and social media, automated analysis of reach and sentiment, and the management of press distribution lists for sending press releases. Depending on the provider, the focus may be more on monitoring or more on the distribution workflow.

Practical Tip: Before choosing a tool, it’s worth asking whether the focus should be on monitoring or on sending—very few providers cover both areas equally well, and choosing the wrong focus often leads to a costly switch later on.

Smaller teams, in particular, benefit from starting with a single, more affordable tool to address their biggest pain point, rather than investing right away in a comprehensive enterprise suite whose full range of features they wouldn’t even use at first.

• Media monitoring across multiple channels
• Automated Reach Analysis
• Centrally Manage the Press Distribution List
• Clarify the focus before making a selection
• Take Advantage of the Trial Period Before Signing the Contract
• Assess scalability for growing teams
• Obtain references from existing customers

Monitoring Tools for Mentions and Sentiment

Tools like Awario scan social media, forums, and news sites in real time for brand mentions and provide an immediate initial assessment of sentiment. This makes it possible to implement social listening even without an in-house data team.

• Real-time search across multiple sources
• Initial assessment of the mood included
• No need for an in-house data team
• Alerts in the Event of a Sudden Increase
• Monitor competitors simultaneously

Hashtag and Campaign Tracking

For PR campaigns with their own hashtag or a clearly defined timeframe, specialized tools such as Keyhole are ideal, as they analyze the reach, interactions, and participating accounts of a single campaign separately from ongoing brand monitoring.

• Campaigns can be analyzed individually
• Reach per hashtag is measurable
• Identify the accounts involved
• Can be used independently of continuous monitoring
• Comparison of multiple campaign phases is possible

Dashboards for Ongoing Reporting

For day-to-day work, what matters most is having a clear overview of all channels in one place. A centralized social media dashboard consolidates mentions, reach, and interactions, eliminating the need to switch between multiple individual tools every day.

• All channels in one place
• Fewer switches between tools
• Automated Reports for the Team
• Real-time alerts consolidated in one place
• Access Rights for Multiple Team Members

PR Tools in Combination with Traditional Public Relations

Software cannot replace personal contacts with journalists, but it significantly speeds up the preparatory and follow-up work—from maintaining distribution lists to determining whether a press release was actually picked up. When combined with traditional public relations work, this creates a workflow that frees up time for the actual relationship-building with newsrooms.

• Automate Distribution List Maintenance
• Check for Received Messages
• More time for media contacts
• Technology complements, but does not replace

Choosing the right tools depends on your focus: monitoring, campaign tracking, or mailing list management. Most teams end up combining two or three specialized solutions rather than relying on a single all-purpose software program that performs only moderately well in each area. Ultimately, what matters more than the number of tools is that the data collected is regularly analyzed and actually used to make decisions, rather than just gathering dust on an unused dashboard.

Selection Criteria for the Right PR Tool

Before making a decision, it’s worth taking an honest look at the actual size of your team: Smaller teams often benefit from streamlined solutions like Buffer, while larger editorial teams with many parallel channels tend to benefit more from more comprehensive platforms like Hootsuite.

Another criterion is integration with existing systems: A tool that does not connect to your existing email program or CRM creates additional manual work instead of saving time. The scope of monitoring features should also be evaluated in advance, as the depth of analysis varies greatly among providers.

• Consider team size when making selections
• Check for integration with existing systems
• Compare Social Listening Features
• Start with small teams and lean solutions

Common Mistakes in Tool Selection

A common mistake is purchasing a comprehensive enterprise solution before it’s even clear which features are actually needed on a day-to-day basis. It’s just as risky to skip a trial period before signing a contract, since many limitations only become apparent during actual use—not from the list of features on the provider’s website alone.

Another mistake is the lack of training for the team after implementation: A powerful tool is of little use if only one person actually uses its features while the rest of the team continues to work manually.

• Don’t Invest in Enterprise Solutions Right Away
• Take Advantage of the Trial Period Before Signing the Contract
• Test it out before you buy
• Provide the team with adequate training after the implementation

What is a social media audit – and why is it essential?

A social media audit is a systematic inventory of all your social media presences. You analyze profile completeness, content performance, engagement patterns, KPI development and the position of your competitors. The result: a clear picture of the current situation and a prioritized list of measures.

The difference between a good and a bad social media presence rarely lies in the budget – it lies in the regularity of the analysis. Companies that audit on a quarterly basis optimize faster, save advertising budget in the long term and react to platform changes at an early stage.

How you proceed depends on the size of your company. For initial orientation, we recommend taking a look at our agency services, which show which depth of analysis makes sense for which type of company.

Step 1 – Inventory and check all channels

Before you analyze anything, you need a complete list of all social media profiles associated with your company – including inactive, forgotten or former employee accounts. Simply use the search function on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest and X – with company names, product names and name variants.

You record the following basic data in a table for each channel:

• Platform and profile URL
• User name / Handle
• Current number of followers
• Last post (date)
• Responsible person or team
• Link to corporate objectives (yes/no)

Profiles that have been inactive for more than six months and have no strategic function should be deactivated or consolidated. Every channel you actively use costs resources – and a half-hearted presence is worse than none.

Step 2 – Check profile completeness on all channels

Many companies underestimate the influence of a fully completed profile on organic reach and conversion. Platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram prioritize complete profiles algorithmically. Here is the audit checklist for the profile level:

Step 3 – Systematically evaluate content performance

Content analysis is at the heart of every audit. This is where you decide which formats and topics to scale – and what to adjust. For each active channel, go back at least 90 days and export the performance data from the respective native analytics tool (Meta Business Suite, LinkedIn Analytics, TikTok Analytics, etc.).

Sort all posts by reach, engagement rate and saves/shares. These three metrics show different things:

• Reach shows how much the algorithm distributes your content
• Engagement rate shows how relevant the content is for your target group
• Saves/shares show real added value – these are the most valuable interactions

Identify the top 10 posts and the flop 10 posts. Search for patterns: Which formats, topics, posting times or image styles perform better? The analysis often shows clear clusters – for example, that carousel posts with specific tips generate three times as many saves as pure brand posts.

Agency tip: Don’t just evaluate absolute figures, but always the engagement rate (interactions divided by reach). A post with 200 likes at 500 reach is more valuable than one with 200 likes at 50,000 reach. Only the engagement rate shows you whether your content is really relevant – and not just seen by many people by chance.

For an in-depth look at the right metrics, it’s worth reading our article on social media KPIs for companies – where we explain which metrics are really relevant for decision-making and which you can ignore.

Step 4 – Evaluate KPIs and recalibrate targets

An audit without a target comparison is worthless. In the fourth step, you compare each measured KPI with a target value. If you have not yet defined any target values, now is the right time – derived from industry benchmarks and your own previous quarter’s data.

Typical benchmark values for B2B companies in Germany:

• LinkedIn engagement rate: 2-4 % good, over 5 % very good
• Instagram engagement rate: 1-3 % good, over 4 % very good
• TikTok completion rate: over 50 % is the target
• Follower growth: 3-8 % per month as a healthy guideline
• Social-to-website traffic: 5-15% of total traffic for B2B

Every deviation between actual and target is a field of action. Prioritize by impact: Which improvement will have the greatest effect on your business goals? Building on clean reporting for managers helps enormously – find out more in our guide to social media reporting for managers.

Step 5 – Competitive analysis as a strategy anchor

No audit is complete without a look at the competition. It’s not about copying – it’s about finding gaps that you can fill and understanding strengths that you need to differentiate yourself against.

Analyze the following points for 3-5 direct competitors:

• Which channels are actively used?
• How high are follower numbers and growth?
• Which content formats dominate?
• Which topics and keywords does the competitor focus on?
• How is the community interaction (do they respond, do the followers praise, is there criticism)?

Tools such as SimilarWeb, Sprout Social or native platform insights can help with this. You can find a complete overview of the best tools and methods in our article on social media competition analysis for companies.

The result of the competitive analysis should always be a clear answer to this question: What do we do differently and better than the others – and how do we communicate this on our channels?

Step 6 – Transfer audit results into an action plan

The last step is the most important – and the one where most companies fail. An audit without a concrete action plan is a wasted analysis. Structure your measures into three categories:

• Quick wins (can be implemented immediately): Profile optimizations, retrofit UTM tagging, improve response time, deactivate inactive profiles
• Medium-term (4-8 weeks): Adapt content strategy, revise editorial plan, test new formats
• Strategic (quarter): Reprioritize channel strategy, adjust budget allocation, evaluate new platforms

Every measure needs a responsible person, a date and a success criterion. Only then will the audit become an actual improvement – and not a checklist.

If you are unsure whether your internal team can fully implement the audit, it is worth looking for external support. You can find more information on this under Contact us.

Frequently asked questions about the social media audit

More on the topic: Social media monitoring – competition analysis – calculate ROI – plan your budget

Related articles

• Social media agency – services and expertise
• Social media KPIs: What really counts
• Social media competition analysis: tools and methods
• Social media reporting for managers
• Contact – Request a social media audit

This is why you should use TikTok tools

TikTok is a powerful and popular social media tool that businesses around the world use to connect with their customers and find new ways to reach them. It’s important for businesses to stay informed about activity on TikTok to have a better understanding of their audience’s preferences and needs. This is why using TikTok monitoring tools is so important. With a TikTok monitoring tool, businesses can not only track the performance of their own campaigns, but also identify trends and get a picture of the market. With the help of these tools, companies can find out:

• What type of content resonates best with users,
• Which hashtags generate the most interactions,
• Which users have the strongest influence on other users,
• What types of videos are the most viewed,
• … and much more

Know which content is successful

These tools allow businesses to gather relevant data to make better decisions for their social media marketing. It also allows you to better understand what content marketing works and what doesn’t. This means more engagement for your business and more sales.

Minimize risks

In addition, monitoring tools help minimize online risks and ensure that your brand will not be caught in negative news. When you are aware of bad news about your company, you can react immediately and prevent damage to your reputation. They also help you monitor competitor campaigns – so you can see what other companies are doing and how you can do it better.

In short, using TikTok monitoring tools makes it easier than ever for you to gather opinion research data about your audience to better understand them. With this knowledge advantage, you can make better decisions and achieve more effective campaign results.

Recommendations: TikTok Tools for Performance

Our current recommendations, TikTok tools for more performance marketing.

• Keyhole
• Modash
• Traackr
• Awario
• Iconosquare
• Storyclash
• Klear
• Pentos

Keyhole

Keyhole provides an industry-leading TikTok monitoring tool that allows you to quickly and efficiently see how your TikTok marketing is doing.

Leading TikTok monitoring tool

With Keyhole, you can not only track the number of likes and comments in real time, but also monitor various data points, such as demographic information, campaign performance, and hashtag performance. These advanced analytics give you a better idea of how well your marketing strategies are working and where you can see room for improvement.

Another great tool is Keyhole’s “Mentions” feature. With this feature you can find out who is talking about your brand and in what way they are promoting their product or service.

Read more here:

• Keyhole

Modash

Modash is a TikTok monitoring tool that helps you track and analyze your presence on the TikTok platform. With Modash, you get detailed insights into the performance of your TikTok campaigns that help you measure their success.

Monitoring and real-time notifications

With Modash, you get access to a range of analytics and reporting features that give you a better understanding of how your campaigns are performing. Features include:

• Post Performance Analytics: Individual Videos
• Audience Analytic (Community): Your community
• Content Insights: Successes of individual videos
• Real Time Alerts: Notification in real time

Read more about all the features here:

• Modash

Traackr

Traackr is an excellent tool to monitor your TikTok account. It offers many features to give you insight into the activities on your account. This tool is available to all users either for free or with a monthly subscription. Traackr offers various features to monitor your TikTok account.

More about the tools and all functions:

• Traackr

Awario

Awario is a powerful tool for monitoring TikTok. With Awario, companies can search the web, social media and blogs for relevant mentions of their brand, products or services.

TikTok monitoring with search function

The tool offers various search options to simplify the search for specific content. For example, you can search for hashtags that were published in a certain time period. You can also search by usernames or by related topics or keywords. Moreover, you can customize your search by adding search filters.

More about all functions here:

• Awario

Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a popular social network that allows people to share short videos with their friends and other members. It’s a great tool for sharing short clips of funny or interesting moments. However, TikTok is not just fun, it can also be a useful tool for businesses to stay in touch with their target audience.

More about the tool:

• Iconosquare

Storyclash

StoryClash is a monitoring tool that lets you keep an eye on your competitors’ social media accounts. Thus, you’ll be able to keep up with your competitors’ latest posts, likes and comments. You can also use StoryClash to identify potential threats and opportunities for your business.

Monitor competitors

StoryClash has a number of features that let you easily monitor your competitors’ social media accounts. For a start, you’ll be able to see the activity on any account you follow, in real time. Thus, you’ll be able to see new posts as soon as they are published, as well as likes, comments or reactions. You can also see which posts have the most engagement and who is engaging the most with your competitors’ content.

Everything about the tool:

• StoryClash

Klear

Klear is a monitoring tool that allows you to monitor your TikTok account. There are several advantages of this tool: First of all, with Klear you can find out if someone has stolen your account or if someone has copied your photos, videos or comments. Also, if you are not sure whether someone has stolen your account or not, you can use Klear to find out if someone else is watching your account and what he or she is doing.

• Klear

Pentos

Pentos is one of the leading TikTok monitoring tools that allows companies to monitor their presence on the TikTok network. This tool offers a number of features that allow companies to monitor their online reputation, collect important data and identify potential problems.

More about the tools and all functions:

• Pentos

Conclusion: Influence success on TikTok significantly

With TikTok monitoring tools, companies can significantly influence their success on TikTok. The goal of every business and brand manager is to increase sales, attract new customers and stand out in the market. To achieve this goal, it is important to find the right strategy for more visibility on TikTok. With the help of various features, such as reporting, monitoring or analytics, companies can significantly increase their reach and stand out in the market.

• TikTok for business
• TikTok Agency
• TikTok Ads

Tip: You can find more tips here: Social Media Software

Hootsuite – Cheapest supplier

Identify, win and retain customers. Get more out of your social media activities with Hootsuite.

• Hootsuite
• Price from 25 Euro / Month
• For 10 social media profiles and 1 user

Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a complete social media management platform for companies and agencies. Manage multiple social networks, schedule an unlimited number of posts, monitor keywords, and collaborate with your team – all from a single dashboard.

• Zoho Social
• Price: On request (individual)

Agora Pulse

Plan contributions in advance, get reports and of course check the engagement of your followers and fans, Agora Pulse can do everything.

• Agora Pulse
• Price from 89 Euro / Month
• For 10 social media profiles and 2 users

Sprout Social

• Sprout Social
• Price from 99 Euro / Month
• For 5 Social Media Profiles

Sprinklr

• Sprinklr
• Price: On request (individual)

EClincher

• EClincher
• Price: From 59 $ / month
• For 10 social media profiles and 1 user

Sendible

• Sendible
• Price from 24 Euro / Month
• For 12 / 192 services and 1 user

Social Report – Most Social Media Profiles

• Social Report
• Price: From 49 $ / month
• For 5 users and 25 social media profiles

Digimind

• Digimind
• Price: On request (individual)

ClaraBridge

• ClaraBridge
• Price: On request (individual)

Brandwatch

• Brandwatch
• Price: On request (individual)

Brand24

• Brand24
• Price: From 49 $ / month
• For 5 keywords and 5 users

StatusBrew

• StatusBrew
• For 10 social media profiles and 3 users

Nuvi

• Nuvi
• Price: On request (individual)

Reputation

• Reputation
• Price: On request (individual)

Monitoring the successes – Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Co

However, social media monitoring is extremely different. There are areas in influencer marketing that can hardly be monitored at all. The last action, for example, coupon codes in Instagram Postings. No direct links can be placed here and therefore clicks and sales cannot be traced. Of course, this is a big problem for many companies who are also building reach with the promotion through influencers. At the same time, there are options such as Facebook ads that can also be switched to Instagram, which are extremely accurate in reporting and monitoring. So accurate that even many critics are concerned about privacy, after all, advertising is becoming increasingly personalized. Here, paths can be traced extremely precisely so that you know and see exactly who likes your own brand, who buys the products, who is interested in similar products, how old the people are, where they come from and what their interests are.

The evaluation in monitoring is so different. If you really want to deal with this topic, you should start directly with software. The subject of monitoring is so diverse and special that it cannot be explained in a few paragraphs. The best recommendation is therefore Learning by Doing and YouTube videos! Add a portion of cleverness and the monitoring can begin.

KPI – Key Performance Indicator

There is only one term for measuring success in business management: key performance indicators. The so-called KPIs document the degree of fulfillment. In online marketing, these are primarily the conversion rate, which provides information on sales or contracts, the click-through rate (CTR), with a statement on the proportionality of clicks achieved in comparison, up to the interaction rate, the engagement rate, which indicates how many reactions there were to certain media content, and up to the response rate, which provides information on how many responses there were to a certain action.

Let’s take another look at the different KPIs:

Interaction Rate – Engagement Rate

The interaction rate or the commitment of the users plays an important role in two areas in particular. On the one hand, in monitoring, i.e. the measurement and evaluation of success following campaigns.

The formula for calculating the interaction rate:
( Likes + comments x 5 ) / Views = commitment</block quota>(
You can adjust the value x 5 as desired, upwards or downwards. More about Intercation rate

Click Rate – Click Through Rate CTR

The click through rate (CTR) is an extremely important indicator in reporting and monitoring. As a key figure, the click rate provides information about the relation between the views, the so-called sightings, and the clicks. The higher this percentage, the more successful the campaign.

• A social media posting reaches 1,000 people,
• Of which 50 click on the offer,
• Gives a click rate of 5%

The click rate formula:
Impressions (views) / clicks = click rate</block rate>
More about Click rate

Conversion / Conversion Rate

For the interaction rate or the engagement, the conversation with the own target group is a decisive success factor for your social media marketing. Conversation is the basic model in media studies. By exchanging information, novelties, innovations, all conceivable forms of information are disseminated.

More about Conversion Rate

Response Rate – Response Rate

The response rate indicates the response rate to a particular campaign and, when comparing several campaigns, which success factors can be derived from it. The response rate can have very different reasons, a simple example would be a marketing survey sent to 1,000 companies. If 400 questionnaires came back, the rate would be 40%.

The formula for calculating the reaction rate:

( received / sent ) * 100 = Response Rate

More about the reaction rate

Influencer Monitoring

Influencer monitoring can be difficult in some cases. In other cases it is again relatively simple. Ultimately, the best way to monitor influencers is to have direct access to the statistics and analyses of each influencer. Of course, this is not always possible, so most influencers usually send screenshots of statistics. You can then use social media software to offset and check these in parts. In principle, however, the aim is not only to equip influencers with free articles and products, but also to report the actions and interactions in a sustainable manner. Just as with advertisements, the ultimate goal is to separate successful influencers from less successful ones so that long-term collaboration only begins with influencers who ultimately provide conversion.

The simplest and most effective way is to use so-called short links. Short links are then placed below the postings, e.g. in the YouTube description, the description below the Facebook posting and of course as a Swipe Up link in the Instagram Stories. In the back end of the short link provider, you can see in the statistics how often the user clicked. If you work with 20 influencers, you can compare all influencers after 30 days. Just write down the costs and the clicks next to them. From this you can calculate how much you paid for a click. The influencers with the most successful campaign will then continue to be booked. The tracking and reporting of influencer campaigns is as simple as that.

You have learned how to calculate the click rate before, with a small variation you can calculate the click price.

Calculation and formula for click price

• Costs / Clicks = Click price

Let’s look at the comparison in a simple example:

• Influencer A costs 2.000 € for 250 clicks = 8,00 € per click
• Influencer B costs 10.000 € with 500 clicks = 20,00 € per click
• Influencer C costs 7.000 € for 800 clicks = 7.20 € per click
• …

As a result, the campaign with Influencer C would persist.

Of course there are other factors, but these are the basics. Of course, there are other factors that are important for the valuation:

• Impressions, reach in the community
• For major influencer branding and positive image
• Conversion Raid, Closings after click

Reporting and monitoring software

If you are more interested in monitoring in social media marketing and want to work with analysis methods of a sSocial Media agency, then we recommend you take a look at Social Media Software. Especially on our large articles on the subject:

• Social Media Software Comparison

A little extra tip, if you read this article, you will understand the entire basic model of ad management. At the end there is then the click rate for the evaluation and success evaluation of the individual campaigns.

Objectives of the clicks: Conversion

Why are the clicks actually registered? The ultimate goal of organic reach but also paid reach is to attract prospects or potential customers to online offerings. For example, to the online shop, where you can buy a new trend product, or to the newsletter Funnel, where you can register.

If you now compare different postings with each other, you draw among others the click rate as a success factor add. In this way, several postings or their successes can be compared with each other. A small calculation example for the calculation of the click rate:

• A social media posting reaches 1,000 people,
• Of which 50 click on the offer
• Gives a click rate of 5%.

Behind the click rate is the so-called conversion. Of course, it’s not only how many people click on the offer that matters, but also the corresponding country page, in the technical term Landing Page, must be optimized in such a way that the desired goals are achieved.

The decisive factor in the evaluation of postings and campaigns, whether social media advertising or advertising in search engines, remains the click rate.

Campaigns Level 1: Separation according to media and content

For real campaigns, up to 20 different media contents are often played off against each other in a split testing. These can be e.g. different photos, graphics, small videos or also longer videos. Each of these postings gets different descriptions, one video gets a very short and concise description, the second video gets a description with many emoticons and the third video gets a very detailed description. The same is not only tested with the videos against each other, of course also with every single photo and with every single graphic. The result is a multitude of different campaigns that are tested against each other, with sufficient media budget.

So the first campaign level looks like media content, against each other different levels are tested:

• Photos and pictures
• Graphics and image montages
• Short videos, so called snack content, less than 10 seconds
• Longer videos, between 10 and 30 seconds

In addition, different types and forms of descriptions are tested against each other. In the simplest form these can be e.g. the following forms:

• Short description with few emoticons
• Short description without emoticons
• Short description with many emoticons
• Longer description with, without and with many emoticons
• Short description with capital letters, with, without and with many emoticons

Now not only different formats can be tested against each other, of course also the contents can deviate from each other and the formulations. Ultimately, hundreds of individual campaigns can be created theoretically and, of course, practically simply by changing the media content. How do you compare their success? The click rate is used here.

But we are not at the end yet, Facebook advertising, Instagram, YouTube and of course other social networks like Xing, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more, not only live from different media content when it comes to campaigns and advertisements, of course it is also about the target groups. Especially the precise targeting of target groups with selected media content makes social media advertising but also advertising on search engines so efficient and promising for brands, services and products. For this reason, campaigns are additionally split according to target groups.

Level 2 campaigns: separation of target groups and demographics

In the second level, blind testing directly goes even deeper, now the target groups are separated on the basis of demographic data, personal data but also information such as interests and affinities. The media content, which was already divided into individual clusters, is only expanded once more by the variable target groups. Thus a certain media content, e.g. photo or video, is matched with a certain type of description, longer or shorter, more or less emoticons, with a certain target group, male or female, 35 to 40 years, 15 to 20 years. This results in the individual campaign groups.

Not only personal data can be retrieved, but also age, gender and marital status. In addition, interests and hobbies can also be called up, so that automobile manufacturers address target groups that have a high affinity for certain vending machines. Depending on which pages or channels the users have marked with Like or which channels or users they follow, individual, targeted groups can be created.

It goes even further, not only personal data and interests, but also geographic data can be included in the campaign creation. Do you only want to reach people from the Berlin area? Do you only want to reach people from the United States? Should only people be reached who live within a 40 km radius of the New York metropolis? You can use any filter you want. You can even call up people in Los Angeles or in Hamburg who are currently there. For example, you can reach tourists in Hamburg and Los Angeles who do not actually live here. Wow. Wow.

Monitoring and performance evaluation by click rate

After a certain test period, which of course depends on the media budget, he can make statements about which campaigns were successful and which were not. If, for example, you equip each advertisement with a monthly budget of 5000 €, you can draw conclusions about the results relatively quickly. Media budget must be set directly high, especially for testing. Once the successful individual campaigns have been identified, the media budget can be reduced. And that’s why start-ups and smaller companies have to reckon with an entry of at least 2000 € per month in order to calculate meaningful results. Because in the end you pay with every euro of range, only by sufficient results conclusions can be drawn. If you want to compare e.g. 20 campaigns with each other, then the click rate helps.

Once again the basic formulas:

• Impressions (Views) / Clicks = Click rate

Accordingly, individual values will be calculated for each individual campaign. These can be compared with each other.

• Campaign AA ( photo motif 1, description 1, target group 1 ) reaches 5000 people, 100 of them click, click rate is 2 percent
• Campaign AB ( photo motif 1, description 1, target group 2 ) reaches 7500 people, 75 of whom click, click rate is 1 percent
• …
• Campaign BA ( photo motif 2, description 1, target group 1 ) reaches 8000 people, 280 of them click, click rate 3.5 percent
• Campaign BB ( photo motif 2, description 1, target group 2 ) reaches 3000 people, 450 of them click, click rate is 15 percent
• …

If this small preselection is now evaluated, it can be concluded that the following campaigns were the most successful:

1. Campaign BB with 15%
2. Campaign BA with 3.5%
3. Campaign AA with 2%
4. Campaign AB with 1%

And from this we conclude as a social media agency or you for your social media advertising, the photo motif 2 was definitely better received than photo motif 1. The overall average of target group 2 had a higher conversion than target group 1.

The media budget for campaign AA, campaign AB and campaign BA will be cut accordingly. The surplus is then put into campaign BB.

Exclude, remove and block referral spam

What is actual referral spam? I love the internet! There are new ideas everywhere, this brilliant idea is from Russia: Referral Spam. Resourceful developers create landing pages. Every small webmaster is of course happy about every backlink, look at it, lands on a landing page. Not a valuable link. No valuable visitor. Only a landing page and a bot that crawls the pages. The principle behind it is as simple as it is amazing: By cleverly linking pages, you as a website operator will of course become aware of the new, visitor sources. And of course you will risk a look at them. In the end you will end up on a simple sales page, landing page, etc. There you will find the typical affiliate offers: travel, medication, etc. So the whole trick is to get you as a webmaster on the sites and sell something. Chapeau! Great idea, really.

Whoever then wants to analyze his visitors will get falsified data, no matter if visitors, duration of visit, origin, etc. Therefore we want to exclude this spam!

Google Analytics, general filters against referral spam

Open Google Analytics Dashboard. Here we go. First open your Google Analytics account. Click on Manage > ‘Select account

Add filter and enter data

Here you now add all lines of code. After each filter you have to add it to the individual website views (next but one picture):

• Filter type: User defined

<Exclude: campaign source

Current list of spam pages

You can find the latest list at Ben Travis from Viget. Meanwhile there are three small lists, because Google Analytics limits the input to 255 characters in the filters.

#1

.*((darodar|priceg|buttons-for(-your)?-website|makemoneyonline|blackhatworth|hulfingtonpost|o-o-6-o-o|(social|(simple|free|floating)-share)-buttons).com|econom.co|ilovevitaly(.co(m)?)|(ilovevitaly(.ru))|(humanorightswatch|guardlink).org).*

#2 - UPDATE

.*((best(websitesawards|-seo-(solution|offer))|get-free(-social)?-traffic(-now)?|googlsucks).com|(domination|torture).ml|((rapidgator-)?(general) ?porn(hub(-) ?forum) ?|4webmasters).(ga|tk|org|uni)|(buy-cheap-online).info).*

#3 - UPDATE

.*((event-tracking|semalt(media)?|(100dollars|success)-seo|chinese-amezon|e-buyeasy|theguardlan|webmaster-traffic).com|traffic(monetize(r)?|2money).(org|com)|pops.foundation|erot.co).*

Add all filters, collect

Now you have created all filters and added them to the individual website views. Perfect.

Extra tip: Google Analytics: remove referral spam retroactively

Whoever has now fixed everything to avoid being disturbed by link spam has taken the biggest step. In 30 days the standard records of the target group and visitors of the website will be ‘clean’ again. If you still want to take a look back, e.g. to analyze the current page, you can apply the filter to the current data view. You can see how to do this here. First step, click Target Group > Overview. There you add a + New Segment.

Add filter and enter data

Look at the screenshot of my Anaylitcs Accout. You exclude, as before, exactly the spam sources. This will ‘reduce’ your number of visitors (in the example on the right) to a real level, without bots.

Here you do not create three individual filters, but connect all three lines of code (point 2) with an AND. Afterwards you save your filter. You can add it as a segment in every website view. For example, if you have several pages.

Extra tip! Exclude the own IP (office, home, etc.)

You still make up a large part of your visitors yourself? Your own traffic also influences the Google Analytics data. There is a great solution for this as well, you can remove your own IP (of course others as well) from the website data view. To do this, you create a general filter in Google Anayltics > Manage, just like in point 1. You assign these new filters to the individual records of the account.

Now you have a small first season of great filters and much cleaner data to analyze your own website.

Exclude referral spam via .htaccess – The current list 12/2015

Unfortunately the wrong visits falsify your statistics. Therefore it is time to do something. How you can “protect” your website from this, also on pages and shops of your customers, is explained here:

1. Open / create your .htaccess<
   Tip: No idea about .htaccess & Co? A free .htaccess generator is available here www.htaccesseditor.com/gr.shtml
   <Enter or add the following lines:

# block Russian referrer spam
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly..ru/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly.org/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly.info/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*iloveitaly.ru/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*econom.co/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*savetubevideo.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*kambasoft.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.* buttons-for-website.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*semalt.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*darodar.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*best-seo-software.xyz/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*adf.ly/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.* get-your-social-buttons.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*rankings-analytics.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*alibestsale.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*o-o-8-o-o.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*traffic2cash.org/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*cyber-monday.ga/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F,L]

Done! Either way, you’re spam-free now (for now)!

The following pages are the best known:

em>ilovevitaly.com/ru/…
<{a6}buttons-for-websites.com
• >em>semalt.com/li><
  darodar.com

You can always find updates on new spam here.
We are looking forward to new pages!