Updated October 25, 2020

The purpose of this PR Measurement Guide is to help you figure out what to measure and how to measure it.

Why Measurement is Important to PR

Social, mobile, and digital are the main channels influencing customers across their buying journey. And they’re just a couple of points apart. The C-suite and agency clients are demanding to see how their company or organization is performing across these channels.

Here’s what one boutique agency owner had to say: “I’m a seasoned PR pro with nearly 30 years’ experience. More so than ever, we’re faced with ROI questions to secure new clients. Data is critical to all businesses today and understanding analytics and how to sort, understand, and use it is the key.”  E. C.

There has been quite a bit of media coverage about the need for PR measurement skills. A recent survey shows that PR practitioners are measuring results, but 61% identified these two challenges as their top concerns:

• What to measure
• How to measure it

Technology has made it possible to measure just about any online activity, so there are many ways to skin this cat.  But it can be complex and analytics programs are not always easy to navigate.

The Ghost of Measurement Past

Until recently, many agencies and company PR departments used the Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) measurement. It’s always been a controversial statistic since the public does not place the same value on an advertisement as they do on editorial content.  So AVE is measuring apples and oranges, at best.

The other measurement standard for PR activity has been reach and media clips.  If we could show that the brand or client was mentioned in a mainstream media outlet with a circulation in the millions we were doing our jobs.

This is measuring outputs – what we do.  It is no longer seen as a valid measurement of effectiveness or success.

The Digital Revolution

The internet and technology have made it possible to measure all sorts of activity we were never able to track before, and assess the impact of our work on business performance far more accurately.

While advertising and marketing embraced digital analytics enthusiastically, PR practitioners have been much slower to do so. Perhaps it’s because traditionally, this kind of measurement has not been a part of our education and practice. And we are, after all, right-brain creatives.

But 90 percent of marketing jobs advertised, and more than half of the PR jobs available, list measurement as a required skill.  So it’s vitally important to learn how to do this.

Is it Possible to Measure PR?

“The ability to effectively measure PR is one of the biggest changes to the industry, thanks to the rise in technology.  Now we have a much better idea of the reach, engagement, and concrete results that come from our PR investments.” John Hall.  PR Trends That Will Help You Dominate 2017 (Forbes)

“You measure PR by answering one or more of the following questions: Outputs: Did you reach or engage your target audience with the messages or content you intended? Outcomes: As a result of reaching or engaging that audience, did they change in the sense of their awareness, comprehension, attitude, behavior and/or advocacy? Organizational Results: What were the effects on the organizations as a result of the changes in the audience, often measured in sales, market share, employee engagement, advocacy, donations, etc.”  David Rockland, Ketchum Partner, Immediate Past Chairman, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication.

So the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

Technology has made it possible to measure just about any online activity, so there are many ways to skin this cat.  But it can be complex and analytics programs are not always easy to navigate.

What to Measure

Measurement is about tracking progress on a given course.  You have to know where you are now and where you want to be at a future time. So let’s say you want to plan a vacation. You have to know where you want to go.  How you get there will depend on where you start out.  You can’t measure anything when you don’t know what you’re aiming for.  So setting goals is the first step.

Outputs vs Outcomes

The biggest change in the last five years is the shift from tracking what you do (outputs) to measuring what happens as a result of what you do (outcomes.) Your goals should be in terms of an outcome.

In 2010 a group of senior PR practitioners, measurement experts, and academics gathered in Barcelona, Spain to work out what PR should be measuring.  They published a paper called The Barcelona Principles. It lays out a clear statement of what to measure.

These principles were updated again in 2020

Barcelona Principles 3.0, which were launched at AMEC’s 2020 Virtual Summit,^[11] acknowledges that common practices in 2010 – even 2015 – may now be outdated.

Sadly, according to a recent survey of PR practitioners more than half (58.9%) said they had not heard of the Barcelona Principles. This is a graphic of the original seven points as they were in 2010 and 2105.

 

The 2020 update has these changes

PR Goals

1. Increase brand awareness in this demographic
2. Reach 15,000 women in this demographic with the brand key message
3. Collect identities using a content lead magnet

PR Campaign

4. Craft a story with media news value about women’s rights, financial literacy and independence.
5. Pitch the story to relevant media.
6. Create a Guide to Women and Financial Literacy.
7. Create a landing page for women to opt-in to get the Guide.
8. Create Facebook ads with a narrowly targeted demographic.
9. Track reach of the ad and other social content (awareness = outcome)
10. Track clicks to the landing page (interest = outcome)
11. Collect names and email addresses of interested women. (leads = outcome)
12. Share this list with marketing and sales.

This campaign performed very well.  In two months they reached more than 16,000 women in this demographic.        More than 1700 new visitors clicked through to the website from their content in media and social media and 250        filled in the form to download the complete guide. (These are qualified leads they shared with marketing.)

When you decide what to measure you have to:

1. Identify a business goal.
2. Set the goal for the PR activity or campaign so that it complements and supports the business goal.

Most companies have “Build brand awareness” as a goal.  Here are some ways PR can measure their activity in support of this goal.

Web Traffic

• Reach: This measures how many people were exposed to your brand and key messages.
• Visitors: The number of people who visited your site in a given timeframe. Increased website traffic is one of the most simple and common ways to look at awareness. This can also be measured by tracking visitors to a specific landing page about a key message.
• The number of people who reach your site by typing in the URL: As this increases, it signifies that more people know your brand name.
• New visitors. If awareness is your goal, then watching this number is important for you. How many new visitors are coming to your site and how is this growing over time?
• Organic search growth. Increased traffic from organic search – especially from branded keywords – can show an increase in people searching for your brand.

Social Media

• Follower growth. Although this is often seen as a vanity metric, audience growth can be an indication of awareness in the marketplace.
• Brand mentions on social media. By monitoring brand mentions you can see the increase in awareness.
• Sentiment: Positive mentions show brand affinity
• Shares and reach. How your content spreads can be a great indication of awareness. How many people are sharing your content?
• Driving traffic to pages on your website, blog or newsroom: The social networks report in Google Analytics will show you which social networks are the most effective for your brand.

Media Relations

• Brand mentions. Measuring the number of media hits alone isn’t enough, but it can help give you an indication of the reach of your brand. How many placements have you achieved? How often is your brand getting mentioned?
• Traffic from articles. The bigger question is how much traffic is your media placements driving to your website. Track the website traffic that’s coming from your media hits to see if this effort is getting people to your site, landing page, blog or newsroom.

How to Measure PR Results

Awareness

To raise awareness of a brand or product is a common business goal – it’s the first step of the stakeholder or customer journey. To reach these people you have to know where they go for information – social media is a very broad term.

You’ll also need to know what kind of information they’re looking for. Then you can craft your content and place it where it will be found.

For example, a company that distributes O-rings and seals surveyed their customer base and discovered that a fair percentage of recent customers had found information about them online.  They hadn’t updated their website for some years and were not actively doing any inbound marketing, so the awareness was hit and miss. Once they had that data they redesigned and updated the site and embarked on a campaign of awareness content published on the right social media platforms.

Measuring awareness

Analytics comes into play once the content is out there. You need to know how it was received:

• Did it get seen, shared, clicked or commented upon?
• Are more people searching for you by name?
• Is the traffic to your site from your brand-URL increasing?
• Are your key messages being received and talked about?
• If not, what is the conversation around your brand about?
• What is your share of voice?
• What is the sentiment of those conversations?

All these can be tracked and evaluated so you have a clear picture of how well you are performing on the first step of the stakeholder journey. Use these tips from the news media when measuring results.

Interest

Once you’re on their radar, the next step is to engender interest in your product, service or brand.  This takes a different type of content – they already know who you are, so it should be content that gives them insight or knowledge about your brand or organization. Offer longer-form content and material that is useful to them in their journey towards becoming a customer or supporter.

Measuring interest

In this part of the journey, you’re looking for return visits, downloads, time on site, video views and traffic to goal pages set up specifically for building interest.

Conversion/Purchase/Donate

If you’ve done a good job with the first steps, this one should not be too difficult.  It will, of course, depend on what your conversion is – if it’s a purchase that’s easy enough to track. But you might have other goals – lead generation for example.  But all you need to know is what the ultimate goal is and set up a system to track those conversions.

Measuring Conversion

Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking conversions.  You can set up goal pages on your site and then track visitors to those pages.  You can even track assisted conversions and last-click conversions, so you know if someone came to your site, left and later came back and converted, or if they converted in one visit.

Advocacy

Now that they are part of your community, retention and advocacy is the next step.  You want them to love the product or service and tell others how great it is. Word of mouth is still the best advertising and social media has become the ultimate word of mouth vehicle.

Measuring Advocacy

Monitoring mentions is the only way to do this.  You need a tool that will gather and evaluate all mentions of your brand or product. You need to know if your social content is being shared and who is doing the sharing.  How influential are they?  Bear in mind that social media is just that – social.  Just posting your content on various platforms is not creating advocacy.  You want to know who is posting about you and what they’re saying. And you need to respond and create conversations with these advocates.

 PR Measurement Tools and Dashboards

There are many dashboards and tools available that can do this. One that is affordable for any business is Sendible.com

In Sendible you can set up monitoring of brand keywords and other related phrases. You can also monitor who is talking about your brand, their influence level and what they’re saying.  It has a robust reporting section where you can create a custom dashboard with the numbers you need to see.  You can even import your Google Analytics, so you have everything in one place.

 

Google Analytics

We developed the PR Measurement Dashboard in Google Analytics to help PR practitioners measure results and value.

It’s a free, custom dashboard and you can download it here:

 

 

This Dashboard allows you to immediately see:

• Where your social media traffic is coming from, geographically. (Measures social coverage by location)
• The social networks that send the most traffic to your website, blog or newsroom. (Measures effectiveness of your social media content and engagement.)
• How many people are on your website or newsroom right now, in real-time. (Shows you real- time activity on the website)
• Where real-time visitors come from. (You can see what referring sites are in play at any given time. If you were to put out a press release or publish an article, you can see where the traffic is coming from in real-time.  Indicates which publication is driving the most traffic and brand awareness.)
• How many of your visitors are new and how many are returning. ( New visitors indicate more brand awareness)
• Overall new visitors and where they came from. (Shows how your new visitors discovered your brand website.)
• Where new visitors came from in the last month.
• The highest-trafficked pages (shows which content is doing well. Useful when running a campaign to see if it is working.)
• Bounce rate. (Shows whether the visitors stayed on your site or newsroom and looked at other content. Measures engagement.)
• Outcomes by page (goals have to be set for this report to work.) This shows how well your activity is doing in terms of reaching the goals set for a specific time period.

Google Analytics is an excellent tool to measure PR results. 

If you have been struggling with the complexity and technicality of Google Analytics, try the free custom PR Measurement Dashboard. It’s a simple way to get started with Google Analytics and learn how to use it to measure your PR activity.

Want to learn how to use the dashboard?

 

 PR MEASUREMENT COURSE

Become one of the rare PR pros who know how to measure results and report ROI

This course teaches you to:

• set measurable goals
• track results in owned, earned, paid, and social media
• use each report on the PR Measurement Dashboard

REGISTER HERE

If you need help with installing Google Analytics or downloading the PR Dashboard into your Google Analytics account, please contact us.  We do provide consulting services.

If you have questions please call Sally – 626 676 6419 or email sally at meritusmedia dot com