How you should be measuring your PR...

Courtesy of AMEC, this November’s Measurement Month. Which means we have a license to harp on the same string (hopefully not tediously!).

We champion the need for measurement in PR, especially when it comes to proving the effectiveness of your earned media and planning for future campaigns. It’s written about in many of our whitepapers and seen in our client insights partnerships. We live and breathe measurement.

But where to start?

To get the best out of your earned media, there is measuring to be done at every stage of the PR journey. At a top-level, it’s important to evaluate the impact your brand is having on the market. Are people aware your brand exists? And how significant is your brand’s place in the market? Finally, what do people really think about your brand?

Start by tracking the number of mentions over time (bearing in mind not all mentions are as weighty as others), then look at how many mentions are simply a citing of your brand compared to a mention where you feature heavily in an article. Compare these to your competitors and rank your brand against them. Don’t forget to measure the market opinion.

In today’s world, quantifying digital impact is just as important for PR as it is for marketing. To keep up with an advancing media landscape, PR pros are looking towards tools to help them measure their online efforts.

The first thing to assess is the traffic that PR is driving to the website – how many visitors have landed to your site thanks to your earned media content, and how many people actually engaged with it? We are talking content downloads, demo enquiries, and newsletter subscriptions. Noting the time each visitor spends browsing is also a good indicator of how interested they are.

Then of course there’s social. When your audience engages with content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., your digital footprint is stretched across the cloud. Be sure to track the most engaged-with articles and platforms, so you can plan for future success.

At the bottom of the funnel, revenue impact should be tracked. Firstly, you can measure the opportunities in the pipeline that are driven by PR (in part or in whole). Secondly, reviewing conversions, or a change in the status of a potential buyer, that derives from earned media work suggests movement towards a sale. Assign a monetary value against those conversions and you can really dig deeper into PR’s impact on business profits.

These are the basics for measuring your PR in the digital age. But of course, data is meaningless without context. Become savvy with PR measurement and you can create meaningful stories that inform your next killer move.

Check out our Measurement Month Toolkit to read about some of the measurement insights projects we've worked on with some top clients. 

And if you want to learn more about how we can help you make sense of your data, chat with us today!