Measuring the success of a PR campaign has never been easier. The fact that a PR team can effectively digitize the impact of their work means they can harvest a lot of data around a campaign.
This data provides an objective overview of the successes and failures associated with a public relations drive. You can see who saw your stories, how they related to them, and what impact that's had on your brand reputation.
However, actually measuring PR success requires some skill and knowledge. You can't just sit on raw data and expect it to show you the results you need.
Instead, PR teams must understand how to work with the tools at their disposal to get a succinct overview of their work.
Only then can they report back to stakeholders and plan future campaigns based on their learnings.
This guide is designed for PR professionals who need a head start in measuring campaigns. This way, you'll know if your PR efforts made the desired impact.
What Is Campaign Measurement in PR?
Campaign measurement in PR involves assessing data to see how factors such as story views, social media follows, and website traffic contribute to your overall brand reputation.
A PR pro's job is to uphold the reputation of their brand or company by working with media outlets and other external influences. Driving positive feedback and improved customer sentiment results in achieving your business goals.
Through PR campaign measuring, you'll be better equipped to demonstrate the value of your PR initiatives and justify further investment in this critical aspect of your business.
In This Guide:
Importance of Measuring PR Efforts
Setting Goals for PR Campaigns
PR Measurement Tools and Techniques
Evaluating PR Campaign Performance
Beyond Traditional Metrics: Next-Level PR Analysis
Communicating PR Results to Stakeholders
Below, we'll look at how and why you need to measure PR campaign effectiveness. We'll highlight the need to set achievable goals, show you the right media monitoring tool for the job, and look at strategies to relay your data to relevant stakeholders.
This guide aims to give you a solid overview of PR campaign planning, so you can start measuring your results immediately!
Importance of Measuring PR Efforts
The whole point of measuring PR is to understand its impact and how it affects your brand reputation.
Do it right and you'll create a layer of accountability around your actions. A PR team can go to other stakeholders and argue they need more resources due to the successes and failures of a campaign highlighted in a report.
Decisions around branding and future marketing projects can be optimized based on data from your public relations campaigns.
What's more, you can take the learnings pulled from your measuring efforts and implement them in the future. This doesn't just have to be about external messaging. Your learnings can range from how your PR department is structured to how your products are viewed with your audience.
In essence, measuring your PR efforts is crucial for refining a current campaign and laying a strong foundation for future initiatives.
Overview of PR Metrics
There are six basic metrics that are used to measure PR success. They are:
Impressions: The number of times your content has been viewed or displayed. You can get a good understanding of digital impressions via a newspaper's online readership figures, but knowing how many people saw your billboard commercial is harder to calculate accurately.
Reach: The total number of unique users who have seen your content. It's useful to help gauge your wider audience. After all, you might have one million impressions, but 80% of those may be from repeat audiences or customers.
Engagement: The interaction of your target audience with your content. Digitally, this includes likes, shares, comments, and clicks. For traditional forms of media, this includes newspaper sales and TV ratings.
Website traffic / store traffic: The number of visitors driven to your website or your store as a result of your PR campaign.
Sentiment analysis: Understanding the sentiment or emotional response evoked by your PR campaign, such as positive, negative, or neutral.
Conversions: The objective effectiveness of your PR campaign in driving tangible actions, such as sales, newsletter sign-ups, or event registrations.
Selecting and tracking the right PR metrics are essential to understand the impact of your campaign, optimize its performance, and guide your future PR initiatives.
Setting Goals for PR Campaigns
Measuring a PR campaign's success can't be done unless you have goals to guide your metrics. For example, a business might spend $100,000 on a campaign on social media channels, but if they don't have quantifiable goals then how will they know if it was worth it?
Here's what you need to know:
Aligning with Business Goals
The way to ensure you meet your business goals is to align your PR strategy when you're starting out.
Common business goals include increasing brand awareness, building customer loyalty, attracting new customers, or launching a new product or service.
Your PR plan needs to have a quantifiable end point that reflects your business goal. If it doesn't, then how are your PR efforts valuable?
Identifying Target Audience
It's hard to achieve impact in PR unless you know who your audience is. You might already have data or knowledge of who your customers, readers, listeners, or fans are. But if you don't, then there's no need to worry.
Collect data from sales figures or social media metrics to split your audience into demographics and behavioral types. From here, you can create an audience persona and know who to target when launching your PR campaigns.
Selecting Appropriate Metrics
Finally, you need to figure out what metrics are actually important for measuring a PR campaign's success.
If you're launching a digital campaign, then social media monitoring can help understand conversions and sentiment from social media channels. A tool like Google Analytics will aid in breaking down website traffic and conversions.
If your campaign also covers traditional, non-digital media sources like newspapers, radio, and TV, then you'll need a tool like CisionOne to gather all data from various metrics and understand the impact of your campaign.
If you're stuck on what metrics to use, think about the quantifiable end-point of your PR campaign. For example, if you simply want to protect your company's reputation, then sentiment analysis via social media mentions would be a good place to start.
PR Measurement Tools
Let's now look at the tools you can use to deliver a well-executed PR campaign.
1) Media Monitoring
Media monitoring is usually the first place a PR team looks for assessing their campaigns.
Popular media monitoring tools, like Cision Media Monitoring, Meltwater, and Mention, allow you to filter coverage by sources, keywords, and date ranges, providing valuable insights into your company's reach and coverage.
Create a list of relevant keywords, brand names, and hashtags, and track them on a regular basis across newspaper, TV, radio, online advertising, and other digital media outlets.
This will help you gauge how well your campaign is resonating with your audience. For a more comprehensive analysis, consider creating a table that compares your media coverage before and after the campaign.
2) Social Media Analytics
Digital media mentions is one thing, but social media is where you get a real insight into how your audience perceives your brand.
Tools like Cision Social Listening (powered by Brandwatch) are ideal for tracking social media analytics on platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram.
Analyzing data such as likes, shares, comments, and engagement rates can provide insights into how well your messages are being received and what content is generating buzz.
If you want cost-effective options, then the Meta Business Suite or Twitter Analytics are good, free places to start measuring.
3) Surveying Brand Sentiment
Finally, we come to sentiment analysis. This is about understanding your audience's emotions and attitudes toward your brand, enabling you to tailor your messaging accordingly.
Again, a tool like CisionOne is ideal here as you can generate reports on brand sentiment and get direct feedback on what your audience likes and dislikes.
Often, audiences don't like interacting directly with the brand, but will tell friends and other social media users how they feel. A tool that monitors these passive conversations provides excellent additional data that helps PR teams measure the true effect of their campaigns.
Evaluating PR Campaign Performance
Let's now look at those six metrics we mentioned earlier and dig into them a little deeper. Below is a breakdown of what data you need to look at when evaluating these metrics, and therefore your PR campaign effectiveness.
Impressions:
Your impressions are the number of views your content receives. It's not always easy to measure. Yes, you can see on X how many people have seen a post, but how do you do this with TV commercials? There's a bit of guesswork here, but a tool like CisionOne can condense the data into trusted, tangible metrics. You can then benchmark your impressions against others, and better understand your PR campaign's impact.
Reach:
Reach is about how wide your messaging has spread and correlates directly with your PR campaign goals. It's important to understand if a press release was picked up by just one newspaper, or a hundred. You also need to know where your stories emerged. Did three online news sites in Arizona pick up your piece, but no one else in the country? If so, you can use reach analysis to understand why that was the case.
Engagement:
Recording the number of clicks or interactions with your PR campaigns isn't really enough. Your engagement metrics need to tell you why people interacted with your story. This includes where links or social media posts were placed, when they were read or viewed, and whether it reached a specific audience. Only then will you know if your engagement rates accurately measure the success of your campaign.
Website traffic / store traffic:
Getting people to your site or store is the result of your hard work. The PR value here comes in audiences or customers relating your brand's perception with reality. Visitors need to believe the experience they've been sold through a PR campaign is real when they head to your website or store. Increased traffic and footfall shows your PR value in a quantifiable metric.
Sentiment analysis:
Using a tool to help, you can discover what audiences think about your brand when monitoring social media platforms and media impressions. Understand the positive, neutral, and negative sentiment behind your brand mentions, and see what you can do better for future PR campaigns.
Conversions:
This covers everything from new audiences signing up to your newsletter to new purchases that generate significant sales. You'll have identified what a successful conversion is when developing your PR strategy. Now it's time to look at metrics such as sales figures, sales growth, turnover, and direct audience numbers to determine whether you achieved your conversion goals.
Beyond Traditional Metrics: Next-Level PR Analysis
The metrics we mentioned above are the simple ones anyone running PR campaigns can use. They just need a little bit of work and the right software.
However, professionals, wider teams, and agencies often need to be tracking PR metrics in greater detail to ensure their campaigns are genuinely delivering on their goals.
Here are three big ones:
AVE Towards ROI
Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) has been a long-standing method for measuring the success of PR campaigns by comparing them to advertising efforts.
However, the industry is evolving and it's time to move beyond AVE to more sophisticated metrics that provide a comprehensive understanding of your campaign's performance.
Return on Investment (ROI) is a better alternative for evaluating PR success.
Unlike AVE, which equates media coverage with advertising value, ROI measures the monetary value generated as a result of your PR campaign. This is likely to be a more useful metric for stakeholders and decision makers, while PR teams can argue for more funding if they can show good ROI.
To calculate ROI, you need to identify the revenue generated by the campaign and divide it by the total cost of the campaign. You'll need good management software to oversee this, and keep all costs and revenues in one place.
Vanity Metrics Vs. Actionable Insights
It's crucial to differentiate between vanity metrics and actionable insights when evaluating your PR campaign's effectiveness.
The best example of a vanity metric is number of impressions or likes. They may look good on paper but they don't necessarily contribute to your campaign's objectives or provide insights for improvement.
On the other hand, actionable insights are metrics that help you understand your audience's behavior and make data-driven decisions to optimize your PR strategy.
This includes awareness statistics, such as how your target audience perceives your brand, and engagement metrics.
Audience Segmentation
Segmenting your audience is the best way to keep costs down and ensure you don't waste time and resources appealing to the wrong people. After all, media impressions mean nothing if the viewer or reader isn't interested in your brand.
PR tools allow you to research your audience and target specific groups based on location, preferences, behaviors, and demographics. It's ideal for platforms like Facebook where people freely display their information.
Digital marketing pros do it all the time, and there's no reason why PR pros shouldn't deploy segmentation techniques to create a more successful PR campaign.
Communicating PR Results to Stakeholders
Lastly, it's time to look at how you show stakeholders – such as investors, line managers, and your finance department – your PR campaign effectiveness.
If you demonstrate positive results from a PR campaign's impact, then you're likely going to receive the resources needed to achieve future success.
And, while you hope your press releases and messaging helps raise awareness to a broader audience, in reality, stakeholders want to know hard ROI numbers.
Demonstrating PR's ROI
To effectively demonstrate your PR ROI to stakeholders, you must establish a clear connection between your PR activities and your organization's bottom line. As we mentioned, raising awareness is one thing, but you also need to turn that into something quantifiable – whether it be improved sales or even just boosted web traffic.
This is where your key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. By identifying your KPIs, you can begin to use your collected PR data to prove your efforts have been successful.
In monetary terms, you could use a cost per result (CPR) metric to highlight your efficiencies. To determine CPR, divide the total PR investment by the total number of results obtained. The result will provide the stakeholders with a clear understanding of the ROI for each PR activity.
As a PR manager, it's crucial to openly discuss the public relations measurement process with your stakeholders, ensuring that they understand the rationale behind the chosen KPIs and ROI calculations.
Clear communication and data transparency will ultimately secure their trust and support for your public relations success.
Last Word on PR Measurement
Whether you're working in a PR team or agency, or are a lone PR professional, being able to accurately measure your work is the easiest way to prove your worth.
From press clippings to sales data, there's a lot of info that goes into a measurement report.
But whatever you decide to focus on, the aim is always the same: to highlight your public relations effectiveness and shape your future projects.
