How to measure the true value of PR

How to measure the true value of PR

Measuring the impact of PR has historically been a difficult task for marketers. While it’s always lovely to see press coverage in all its glory, it’s just as important to know what this actually means for your business and if it’s driving the right kind of results.

The reality is that effective PR measurement goes beyond column inches. It’s about understanding how your PR efforts influence awareness, your reputation, engagement, and ultimately, business outcomes. In this article, we look at how you can measure PR value in a way that really matters.

How has PR success been measured in the past?

Traditionally, Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) was the default metric for PR. This compares the cost of media coverage secured through PR, to what it would have cost as paid advertising.

However, AVE is now widely discredited because it doesn’t account for tone, audience relevance, and impact. For example, a half-page feature in a trade publication could be worth far more to your business than a mention in a mass-market tabloid.

This is why it’s so important to understand what you want to achieve from PR before you start sending out any press releases or recruiting a PR agency.

Remember: you need clear targets before you can assess your results

Do you want to increase brand awareness in a new or existing market, or position yourself as a thought leader on a certain topic, or improve visibility on search engines?

Once you know what you want to achieve, it’s only then you can start to understand whether it’s working for you and your business.  Not all media coverage is the same, so once you’ve established your goals you can start to interrogate coverage and look at the more meaningful metrics, for example:

There are tools such as Meltwater, Onclusive and Cision that can help you track coverage and provide data that you can turn into insights. And in addition to the article itself, you can look at whether the piece drove website traffic, increased social media followers or subscribers or even secured direct conversions to sales.

If you can measure these metrics, you can start to understand how PR is supporting your business goals and make informed decisions about how you approach this activity going forward.

Decide which metrics matter to you

If your PR goal is to improve your search engine visibility, it’s very likely that you will be looking at metrics such as:

These all help to quantify PR’s SEO impact. Tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush can help to track how PR exposure influences organic reach and long-term search visibility.

In contrast, if your goal is to increase your brand awareness with your peers, or demonstrate your expertise to potential clients, or extend the awareness of your business to public sector organisations, then you’ll simply want to be seen in the right publications to hit that demographic. You’ll want to see the reach of those publications and how many people would have seen both the online and offline copy.

PR success means something different to everyone

Sometimes PR measurement is just about someone having awareness of your brand before you meet them, such as meeting someone at a networking event and they are already aware of your company they read about it in a trade publication. At others, it’s a more technical assessment of how your brand stacks up against competitors online.

In essence, PR measurement means different things for different businesses, it works in different ways for different sectors and gives a good return on investment when you know, as a business director or marketing manager, what you want to get from it.

That’s why at Front Door we always say that when you measure the right things, you move from reporting numbers (that can be meaningless) to using PR to make a real impact on your business.

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