PR is all about getting your brand noticed and building positive sentiment, awareness, and thought leadership in your market. Despite this, aligning metrics to bottom line impact is an area that 75% of comms professionals feel is one of the biggest challenges, according to a study by Global PRWeek and Cision in 2017.
So, how can professionals improve their PR reporting, and evidence the value of their campaigns to key stakeholders?
In this blog, we explore PR best practices when it comes to measuring and reporting on performance.
Why are PR metrics important?
Outlining your PR efforts through clear, tangible metrics helps you to showcase the value of your PR and why it is needed. This is especially important for justifying PR activities and budgets to stakeholders, including directors, board members, and senior management.
Here are just a few reasons why setting PR KPIs and metrics is important.
- More accurately measure performance
Setting your metrics at the beginning of your PR campaign allows you to identify areas that can be refined and improved. Throughout the campaign period, you will need continuous media tracking to monitor your metrics and understand what’s working, as well as any need for adjustments to improve your next campaign.
- Align strategy with business goals
Key PR metrics allow you to identify the strategies that will most likely reach your intended audiences, all while bringing your plan closer to your wider business goals. For example, you may want to boost your brand awareness, thought leadership, or reputation, or amplify your SEO strategy through increased traffic and backlinks; choosing the right metrics for your strategic approach will help keep everything aligned.
- Increase accountability
Compared to other marketing channels like paid advertising, social media, and SEO, it can be harder to know how to demonstrate PR’s value in terms of ROI. By identifying relevant metrics, you will be able to show how PR has actively contributed to your brand’s visibility and reputation. This can help to give justification for future budgets and allocation in your activities, whilst also boosting overall accountability for the work being completed.
Understanding the different metrics
Each PR metric will help shape your approach, and you should try to identify what you want to achieve before reaching out to journalists, publications, and associations.
- Coverage
Coverage is perhaps the most fundamental metric when it comes to PR campaigns. It measures the amount of exposure your brand receives through media sites, and it can extend to earned media and paid media. High coverage helps to boost credibility and brand awareness, putting your brand at the centre of discussions.
- Mentions
Mentions refer to the number of times your brand is referenced online and can be a key metric for brand awareness. When organisations are mentioned online, it builds brand awareness and gets your business in front of the people that matter. Beyond this, mentions can also aid your GEO and SEO strategy as unlinked mentions can still contribute to your brand authority and recognition, therefore increasing your rankings.
- Circulation and monthly unique visitors
These metrics look at the audience's reach of your coverage. Circulation refers to the distribution of physical copies of a publication, whereas monthly unique visitors measure the number of distinct users that visited a publication’s website within a given month.
While understanding how many people actually read an article covering your brand isn’t as readily available, these metrics help you to see how many people it could have reached throughout your campaign.
- Backlinks and domain authority
Backlinks measure the amount of inbound links to your website from articles. When it comes to backlinks, you’ll want to focus on ones from sites with a high domain authority to support your SEO and improve your site’s placements on search engine result pages (SERPS). However, whilst high authority links are preferable, even lower authority links will still direct traffic to your site, potentially helping to increase the chance of new leads and conversions.
Websites aren’t all born equal, and so measuring the domain authority allows you to understand the credibility of any publications that link back to your own website. In getting backlinks from sites with good domain authority scores, you will also increase your own website’s domain authority score which, in the eyes of Google, makes your site more trustworthy and authoritative.
- Referral web traffic
Referral web traffic refers to any time a user lands on your website after clicking on a backlink from another site. By using Google Analytics, you can understand any spikes in referral traffic, as well as understand where users have come from and why, especially after gaining coverage.
- Open rate and click rate
If your PR strategy is utilising trusted distribution or email CRM platforms, then open rates and click rates can be a vital way to measure the engagement of your outreach. Open rate refers to any time anyone opens your press release or pitch, whereas click rate measures when people click the links within your email approach.
Even when your efforts don’t result in coverage, ascertaining a list of journalists who have opened and engaged with your outreach allows you to see who is warmed up and familiar with your brand. This means they could be more open to covering future stories or may come to you with inbound journalist requests for opportunities to provide commentary or insight.
- Sentiment
Measuring the sentiment of your coverage allows you to understand how people are responding to your brand. Positive sentiment is attributed to people expressing favourable opinions or feelings, whereas negative sentiment is displayed when there is dissatisfaction from readers or negative coverage of your business. In the case of negative sentiment, you may wish to consider reputational management to maintain positive feelings towards your brand.
- Social media engagement
Social media can aid PR activities, with many brands looking at followers, likes, shares, and comments to measure engagement. By tracking the performance and mentions of your brand across social media, you will gain a more holistic understanding of your PR performance, including additional reach and mentions.
- Sales and leads
Following your PR campaign, you may spot a noticeable increase in your sales and leads during this period. This could be the result of several pieces of coverage that work together to help get people more commercially interested in your brand. This is why it is always worth monitoring your leads and sales pipeline against your PR activities, as these metrics can indicate sustained success and a clear ROI off the back of your campaign efforts.
Where to start with building a solid PR strategy?
No two PR campaigns are the same, so your business should start by carefully choosing the metrics that will maximise audience reach and help show tangible evidence of your success based on your overarching goals. With these metrics in mind, you can begin planning tactics that align with hitting the goals you’ve mapped out.
Once you’ve finished planning your goals and setting your key metrics, the next step is working out which audiences you want to reach. Think about who they are, why they should care, where they will be found, what characteristics they share, how familiar they are with your brand, and what makes them buy or convert. The best audience planning comes in the form of data-driven customer or buyer personas, which detail exactly how to target the right people with content that meets their interests, addresses their needs or pain points, and matches their preferences.
A successful PR strategy will proactively identify opportunities for coverage, and this is only made possible by understanding your competitors and market. When identifying your metrics, spend time analysing the performance of your rivals to spot where they have had success and where they haven’t. Meanwhile, constantly monitoring what is happening in your sector will provide opportunities to create relevant content and targeted discussions with journalists and publications.
PR metrics should be reviewed monthly or quarterly, as news cycles and opportunities are constantly evolving, and so your strategy will need to evolve in tandem. It’s important to note that the impact of PR can take weeks, or months in some cases, to show long-term results; this can make it harder to track business success attributed to PR within a short campaign period, which is why setting expectations with stakeholders is another crucial step in evidencing the value of your PR efforts.
What are the best PR measurement tools?
The best tools for your brand will depend on what you are aiming to achieve from your PR campaigns. Here are a few to consider.
- Outreach platforms
You’ll want to choose a PR outreach platform that helps you to connect with journalists, publications, and their audiences both more efficiently and with greater impact. Muck Rack, Cision, Meltwater, Roxhill Media, and Prowly are considered the top platforms, allowing you to build journalist lists and measure who has opened and clicked on your email approaches.
- SEO platforms
Choosing platforms like Google Analytics and SE Ranking provides a great way to measure your website and SEO performance off the back of PR campaigns. With these tools, you can identify increases in general web traffic, referral traffic, and conversions. Meanwhile, use domain authority checkers such as MajesticSEO to understand the quality and quantity of backlinks to your website.
- Audience learning platforms
Sites like Similarweb and Coverage Book allow you to understand the popularity of websites, through metrics like monthly unique users and circulation. While you won’t be able to ascertain how many people have actually read an article, these metrics provide a guideline for the maximum reach you can achieve.
- Media monitoring platforms
Finally, you’ll want to monitor coverage and industry discussions, so sourcing a media monitoring tool can help keep track of what’s happening in your sector. Brandwatch allows businesses to comprehensively understand conversations in their market, as well as get a picture of audience sentiments and topical trends relating to their brand, while setting up Google Alerts sends you notifications whenever someone mentions your brand’s name.
How we support PR campaigns
At Blue Frontier, we place data, performance, and metrics at the forefront of our thinking. Our PR services take a bespoke and collaborative approach, and we work with our clients to set goals and create strategies that further increase brand awareness, reputation, and credibility. We use Cision, the market-leading PR platform, to build relevant journalist lists to aid outreach and measure the success of our campaigns. We also leverage tools like Brandwatch and Google Alerts to monitor brand mentions and coverage, and to support strategic data-backed campaign planning.
Learn more about how we can help grow your business with performance-driven PR support by getting in touch with our team.
