SHIFT’s Worst 10 PR Posts from 2013

In the spirit of looking back over 2013, not everything was wine and roses. Some posts simply didn’t bring the love. Here are the 10 worst performing by page visits and time on page:

1. The Fiction Of The Quick Hit In PR
2. 3 Categories Of PR And Earned Media
3. Cooking With Your PR And Marketing
4. Make PR From Your Pest
5. Influential PR Likability
6. 3 Steps To Building Great Company Culture
7. Mailbag Keeping Top Of Mind With Customers
8. 4 Secrets About Summertime PR
9. One Billion Reasons Facebook Hashtags Are About Instagram
10. There Is No Best Time For Anything

Now in the spirit of always being helpful, we’d like to share how you can find some insights about your worst posts poor performance.

The question we have to ask is this: why did these perform badly?

• Did we publish low quality content? An abnormally high bounce rate with a low time on page might indicate that.
• Was it just bad timing? Did we publish a post during a major news cycle or on a holiday? A look back at the news on that date or a quick glance at the calendar should reveal that.
• Something else, another obscuring factor? We’d look at the rest of our site traffic for the day. Was the site overall less busy that day compared to other days? Maybe one of our influencers didn’t share it that day.

If it’s something else, it may take some best guesses and testing to find the answer. The best lesson we can share here is to ask questions. Question everything, until you can come to a reasonable, supported conclusion.

What can you do with your worst performing material?

• Consider rewriting them if the topic is still good and you can rewrite it in a way that resonates.
• If timing was an issue, consider sharing it again via social networks to see if it gets any new traction.
• Otherwise, dig a little deeper into the metrics for that post. Look at other analytics for the day it was published – social, web, etc. – and see what else was going on.

While you can’t save every post nor will every post be the most popular, you can repurpose the content if you think it still has a lesson to teach to your audience. Try, try again.

Chel Wolverton
Senior Marketing Analyst

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