Measuring the effectiveness of PR campaigns has long been a subject of discussion within marketing circles.
PR teams need to demonstrate their campaigns have real value to allow them to access more of their organisation’s marketing budgets.
Traditionally PR was always seen as something difficult to measure as it was seen as mostly about improving brand sentiment or perception in the mind of target customers. It’s very difficult to pin that down and measure it in a meaningful way.
Thankfully things have changed with the rise in popularity of digital PR. With online media coverage it has become much easier to measure outcomes and impacts of PR activity.
At Motive we measure everything and collate detailed reports for our clients every month. These reports show all activity which has been undertaken on behalf of the client that month, including all content created, all conversations with interested media, and all coverage won.
We also count all links and report on if they are follow or no follow links and also measure the domain rating of the linking site using Ahrefs as our measurement tool.
Metrics
Measuring all our activity in this way allows us to demonstrate our value to clients and also helps us to track our own performance against our goals and objectives. It also allows us to tally our results across quarters and years. That’s why we were able to share that during 2022 we won 11,290 items of media coverage for clients along with 14,259 links. Click here to read a round up of the year.
Not all agencies are as open as us when it comes to sharing their results and we suspect that might be because they’re not quite as proud of them as we are. We worked with 30 clients last year and delivered an average of 376 items of media coverage for each of them - that’s more than one item of coverage for every day of the year. We are talking about high level media targets too with national coverage making up the lion’s share of our results.
Our measured results are even more impressive when it comes to links. In 2022 we built 14,259 links for clients. That works out at an average of 475 per client or almost 40 every month. Again we are talking about high quality results here too with the majority of those links coming from domains with a DR of at least 30. We don’t just deliver a high quantity of results, we also target quality.
Tools
Tools such as Ahrefs or Moz, make it much easier for PR teams to measure and report their success. This helps demonstrate our effectiveness to clients and can also help to persuade marketing managers to allocate more budget to PR.
Brand sentiment remains difficult to measure but coverage and clicks can easily be tracked. Clients can then see the impact of this PR generated traffic in their own analytics and it becomes possible to track exactly how many sales a PR campaign has generated.
Social media also provides opportunities for measurement with content shared across social platforms being very easy to record levels of engagement and sharing.
If you are looking for an agency who put measurement and reporting at the heart of their PR campaigns please do get in touch for a free discussion.