There is an old adage: any press is good press. But is it really? There is no doubt that press coverage can bring a lot of attention to your brand but what is the business impact? Now with digital tools, we can get an inside look at what some of these tangible gains look like and with that perhaps we can even answer the question of whether any press, good or bad, is indeed good for your business.
These are some other points we will be looking at:
- Is positive press coverage always better than negative press?
- What long term SEO value can we get out of press coverage besides the spike in traffic?
- Does it matter if you are a big or small brand?
- Is there long term damage from negative PR?
Methodology
For this test we look at the following metrics:
- Press mentions: measured by comparing brand mentions in Google News search the month before and after the PR event
- Web traffic and backlinks (SEO): The measurements were made using Moz’s Open Site Explorer, SEMrush and Ahrefs.
- Headline mentions and social shares were measured using BuzzSumo.
Image1: PR by the numbers
Note that the test was counted by as a collaboration between Fractl and Moz.
- The effect of media coverage on brand mentions, web traffic and backlinks (SEO)
We look at 3 brands; 1 good and 2 negative PR.
Roman Originals
If you were on Facebook around this time last year, you would have seen the great debate on whether a dress is black/blue or gold/white. This rather mundane discussion snow stormed into something of an internet phenomenon.
Image 2: Dress at the center of the debate
The story was picked up by major publishers including Buzzfeed, wired and even Taylor Swift jumped onto the bandwagon.
Image 3: Taylor Swift joins the debate
Roman Originals was the biggest winner out of the brands that were analyzed, seeing a 17.5k% increase in press mentions, nearly 420% increase in organic traffic and a 2.3k% increase new backlinks.
Image 4: Roman Originals Web Traffic
This impacted sales with a staggering 560% increased in global sales within ONE day of the story hitting the news. Beyond that, the brand appears to be enjoying the long term lift in traffic to the website.
Backlinks contribute to search ranking and in this case we also see a spike in backlinks over time and that has elevated Roman Originals search results.
Image 5: Roman Originals Backlinks
Miss Universe
If you have living under a rock, the short version of the story is that the host, Steve Harvey, crowned the wrong Miss Universe winner at the live event that was watched by millions across the world.
Of course the conspiracy theory is that this is all an elaborate PR stunt to rejuvenate the once thriving Miss Universe Pageant. Understandably there were backlash over the mistake. Steve Harvey had to apologize repeatedly and this has generated tonnes of memes online.
Image 6: Steve Harvey Online Meme
What is interesting is that negative PR didn’t seem to have tarnished the brand. In fact, we see a 199% jump in press mentions when compared to last year’s pageant. This year’s event definitely enjoyed more mileage than any other years.
Besides press mentions, we also see a spike of nearly 123% increase in organic web traffic. Looking at the chart, there seem to be already a gradual climb in organic traffic so it may be too early to give Steve’s booboo credit for the spike.
Image 7: Miss Universe Web Traffic
There also seem to be little impact on backlinks. Despite that, the payoff will actually come next year when millions will be tuning in to Steve Harvey hosting the pageant again (this is just the first year in his multi-year contract).
Image 8: Miss Universe Backlinks
But is there really benefits in negative PR? The media loves conflict but too much negative press coverage can lead to irrecoverable damage to a company’s reputation and that will ultimately impact business, as demonstrated in the next case study below.
Turing Pharmaceuticals
The former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals was Martin Shkreli. Martin was the one responsible for raising the price of a prescription drug by 5000%. The fact that the drug is crucial to some patients got the media’s attention. Martin and company was subsequently featured by New York Times, BBC, NBC and NPR.
Image 9: Martin Shkreli in the media
Martin defended the price hike as sound business decision but that didn’t save him from fraud charges. He was arrested by the FBI and subsequently stepped down as CEO.
The Turing Pharma story has a long shelf life. After the story broke, the company saw a massive 821% jump in press mentions. The website saw a 318% jump in organic traffic. Similar spikes occurred during Shkreli’s arrest, resignation and congressional hearing.
Image 10: Turing Pharma Web Traffic
In terms of backlinks, the brand saw significant increase. Within a month, the site had a 382% increase in backlinks, pushing the site’s ranking on Google’s results page.
Image 11: Turing Pharma Backlinks
SEO value and brand recognition not withstanding, Turing Pharma got hit with negative brand sentiment that resulted in permanent damage to a tune of $14.6 million loss during the 3rd quarter of 2015.
2. Key takeaways
1. Spikes are more important than absolute number of press mentions
In terms of absolute volume of press mentions, the larger brand like Miss Universe will naturally get more compared to the other 2 smaller brands. However, looking at the data, the smaller brands get a much bigger spike in press mentions and this translates better into traffic growth and backlink volume. Comparatively, the jump in media coverage for the bigger and better known brand doesn’t translate as well and results in a smaller business impact.
2. Negative news does attract more coverage and social shares
Intuitively we know that people like negative news like scandals and gossips and this is apparent when we look at the numbers. In general, the negative stories (Miss Universe and Turing) generates 172% more headlines which in turn created 176% more social shares than the positive story.
Although bad press does translate into more web traffic and SEO ranking, sustained negativity will ultimately damage the brand. Turing Pharmaceutical has seen its reputation irreversibly tarnished which resulted in financial losses.
3. Brands that are quick to leverage media coverage get the most benefit
This is where a good crisis management setup and plan comes in handy. Crisis management is not just important for containing a potentially damaging situation but when applied correctly and quickly can allow companies to ride the large press coverage and public interest to create an even wider awareness for the brand. Roman Originals masterfully news-jacked a story about itself by doing just that.
They quickly capitalize the coverage by tweeting to settle the debate over the dress’ color and swiftly updated its homepage to showcase The Dress.
Image 12: Turing Pharma Backlinks
They milked it further by releasing a white and gold version of the dress. This was wisely set up as a charity to generate massive goodwill for the brand.
At Gorilla Digital, we provide training in the areas of digital marketing and crisis management. We trained businesses in the use of digital technology to track business impact and performance as well as crisis monitoring and mitigation. And of course as marketers, we use and test some of these techniques as well.