Measuring Success: The Importance of Metrics in PR
Measuring Success: The Importance of Metrics in PR
For anyone working in PR, media measurement is one of the most important and often challenging aspects of the field. While quantifying the impact of PR is essential and non-negotiable, it can be difficult to determine how to measure and use it to showcase team value to stakeholders. Kristen Dunleavy at Muck Rack, a software platform helping PR agencies connect with journalists, recently shared her advice for measuring success on the platform’s blog.
Importance of Metrics
Tracking metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) is one of Muck Rack’s six essential parts of a successful PR workflow. When tied to organizational goals, metrics and KPIs ensure that PR teams contribute to larger company-wide initiatives. This data can be used to determine what’s working, refine future campaign efforts and optimize resources going forward. At a larger scale, stakeholders can see the value of earned media through KPIs and other metrics, often through percentage increases.
Essential Metrics
The most relevant metrics can vary for different teams, but many PR professionals use these top eight metrics to track KPIs.
Stories placed tracks secured coverage across media outlets and formats, demonstrating PR efforts' value, especially when stories appear in noteworthy publications.
Share of voice (SOV) compares brands against their competitors and shows how much space they take up in the industry conversation, which is a great data point to present to executives and stakeholders.
Advertising value equivalency (AVE) determines the success of an earned media placement through comparison to the cost of an advertisement of a similar size (though this practice is now largely outdated).
Reach and impressions gauge overall brand awareness but is limited to calculating only quantity and not considering quality.
Sentiment measures the tone of articles mentioning a brand and can be used to demonstrate brand impact, quality of media mentions and preempt reputational crises.
Key message pull-through measures how well media coverage conveys a campaign’s key messages, offering great insight into the quality of media coverage.
Website traffic shows the number of visitors to a brand’s website after earned media coverage and link placements, showcasing the reach of media campaigns.
Social engagement includes numerous metrics, including likes, comments, shares, clicks and mentions.
Measuring Success with Software
While it must be used with caution and be reviewed by a human, artificial intelligence can support PR teams in measuring sentiment through automatic emotion detection. Artificial intelligence can assign positive, neutral or negative sentiment ratings to coverage reports based on the headline and copy, making the initial round of review more efficient.
To monitor website traffic, Google Analytics is a free tool available to PR teams. Certain tools, including Muck Rack, can track backlinks, which means PR professionals can see when websites, products or press hits are linked in articles.
Individual social platforms have built-in tools to track social engagement, including Meta Business Suite, TikTok, X, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Muck Rack offers many tools for PR professionals to track KPIs and metrics, including media monitoring and alerts, trend reporting, SOV calculation and key message pull-through reports.
To learn more about measuring success through metrics and KPIs, read the Muck Rack blog post here.
