Metrics and Public Relations

From the early days of PR, agencies, independents and clients alike have been searching for ways to demonstrate the true impact of their actions. This request has become even more in demand as companies are relying more heavily on metrics to drive decisions across the business. This is logical and responsible.

But what if metrics for a particular department or activity are hard to come by?
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There have been a variety of approaches to creating PR-related metrics: impressions, mentions, features, tone, share of voice, web traffic, conversions, etc. Each of these metrics have their pros and cons. For example:

• Impressions show you the maximum outreach of your stories based on the total number of readers for each outlets. Again, this is the maximum. But not every single reader or subscriber of a news outlet reads every single story published so your metric is flawed.
• Mentions give you the total number of stories that mention your company. This provides a view of the volume of stories being produced but what if your company name is a generic word or there is another company or product with a similar name? It takes quite a bit of time to sort through the coverage to ensure you are only counting the correct articles. And furthermore, even Google searches don’t capture every single article out there so may need to pull from a variety of sources and set up different alerts to try and cover most bases but that may not cover everything.
• Tone shares the intention of the stories published about your company. This metric attempts to answer the question: are reporters taking a positive, neutral or negative perspective? This one is difficult and time consuming. Many databases offer services that claim to identity tone in articles but that type of algorithm can be difficult to trust. Beyond this, many stories tend to be neutral. They are fact based and aren’t steering readers one way or another, so what are you supposed to do with a metric that says the majority of your coverage is neutral?
• Share of Voice expounds on the impressions/mentions metrics by taking the numbers from the entire industry or at least select competitors to determine just how your PR efforts compare to others. This metric has the same concerns -- time consuming and may not encompass everything actually published.
• Web Traffic/Conversions provide an idea of the original source of traffic to the company’s website and possible sales conversion. It is always a great proof point when you can show that a story placed by PR resulted in a win or at the very least traffic to your site. This type of metric requires that your team has the appropriate analytics and tracking in place from the very beginning as very rarely (read: never) will a news outlet provide you with their analytics for your own sales use.

​Before a new engagement with an agency or freelancer or, at the end of the year, as you begin planning for the next year’s PR program, clearly discuss with the PR team and your company’s leadership which metrics are important to your company and why. This can help keep everyone on the same page as well as guide discussions around what campaigns make sense to execute upon and which won’t help the team achieve its goals.