The top PR metrics to measure in your 2024 KPIs

So, you’ve spent months developing content for your latest client and now it’s time to run a digital (content) campaign. But after the campaign is finished, how do you plan on measuring its success?

When it comes to public relations, attributing success through hard data and analytics is a fairly recent trend. Traditionally, PR efforts were measured through metrics like "reach", which was a fancier way of saying, “here’s the potential number of people who may have seen or engaged with this content.”

Now we’re in a Digital PR age and PR professionals are being more and more integrated with marketing teams, these old metrics just won’t cut it. Today’s evaluation of (digital) PR should come with much deeper insight into content performance in order to evaluate the return on investment for (digital) PR.

But first…

Honestly? Two reasons – one good one and one very, very frustrating one:

• To get better at doing what you do, and
• To convince your clients/overlords that what you do is worth doing

If a sales rep does well, it's generally reflected in the figures. If a digital marketer checks off all the right keywords, the business's Google ranking will go up.

But so much of PR is intangible.

Finding a way to quantify the outcomes of your work will not only go a long way in convincing Scrooge McDuck that you're worth your paycheck, it will also pretty much guarantee that you'll pick up the knowhow to know what parts of your work are worthwhile – and what you can skip altogether.

There are two ways to measure things:

1. Randomly grabbing at any number you see, without much of an idea of what you're measuring and why, and
2. By tracking specific metrics that align with your KPIs and broader company goals

This guide will help you nail #2.

To make sure we're all on the same page, let's begin with the basics.

PR metrics are the things you use to measure the impact of your campaign or project. Why?

• To impress your boss (or your boss' boss). Presumably, the people who are paying you want proof that continuing to pay you is a good idea. Analytics is a great way to prove your worth and the worth of the PR department.
• To determine what is (and isn't) working. Your content may be amazing, but if it isn't reaching your audience's wet eyeballs, you might as well just print your content on a bunch of parchment paper and launch it into space. Analytics tell you if your content is being viewed, if it engages, and if people stick around.
• To inform strategy. Your analytics are an opportunity to course-correct and refine your strategy in real time. If your content isn't being picked up, isn't being read, or doesn't engage the people who do read it, then it's obvious some adjustments need to be made. And as we all know, content without a brand strategy is like screaming into a water well: a lot of fun, but not really that useful.

And there's a whole lot to choose from. (We have a pretty exhaustive list down below!)

There are useful metrics, which use data or the careful analysis of qualitative information to demonstrate change over time, and not-so-useful metrics – you know, those ones that sound fancy but don't actually mean anything.

Some examples of good PR metrics:

• Share of voice
• UTM site traffic
• Media mentions

Some examples of crap PR metrics:

• Ad value equivalency (but more on that later)

It sounds bananas, but most people spend a wild amount of time chasing meaningless metrics, either because they've been asked to by some woefully uninformed manager, or because they didn't take the time to figure out whether or not what they're measuring actually paints a meaningful picture of the impact of their work.

The other problem?

It can be super hard to judge which metrics are useful, and which aren't.

For example, if impressions don't mean anything to your campaign but everything to your CEO – are they useful to track? Probably, if you want to keep your job. As always, the business of pulling off a successful PR campaign is 50% working on the actual campaign and 50% convincing the rest of the company that it is worthwhile.

Simply putting together a page of clippings doesn't cut the mustard these days. The person you report to, be that CEO or client, will want to understand how their investment in you contributes to them achieving their business goals. That means that while a lot of your goals pursue getting eyeballs on your content, you need to be able to measure the impact of all of your content, be that paid, earned, social or owned.

That means that the next time your boss has a bit too much coffee and starts scrabbling around for hard numbers that justify your existence, you can point them to your KPIs, confident in the knowledge that they paint a good picture of your success story.

Think of your PR KPIs as metrics with purpose. You need to define them in relation to your PR campaign strategy as a whole in order for them to be meaningful (and remotely useful).

Here's what a poorly thought-out PR KPI might look like:

A company hires me to help launch a new product that they hope will boost sign-ups to their SaaS platform. For my tactics, I create an email campaign, sales landing page, press kit and series of social posts for the launch. For my KPI, I choose to measure coverage, deciding that landing five pieces in mid-market publications will demonstrate a successful campaign since our previous campaign resulted in four pieces of coverage.

Why this might not be the best approach:

Choosing "coverage" as a key indicator of success doesn't quite work as it doesn't take into account the greater company goal, which is to increase registrations for their SaaS product. It also omits the audience of those items of coverage (are they a good client fit for the business?).

What it may be better to measure:

• The amount of site traffic originating from my coverage and social media post/mentions
• The number of visitors or signups to my unique landing page
• The conversion rate of my landing page

Additionally, I would consider measuring the engagement figures of my email campaign and the traffic that my press room and media kit receive. Rather than being the core KPI, these metrics would help me determine whether my tactics could be performing better – for example, whether changing the subject line of my campaign or reviewing the media list I'm sending to could improve engagement.

KPIs – key performance indicators – guide each team within a business towards achieving broader company goals by setting quantifiable milestones that need to be ticked off on the road to hitting a project objective.

Finding the right PR metrics to measure is pretty much essential if you want to consistently hit your objectives (or almost hit – some milestones are purposefully made to be just out of reach, because apparently life isn't hard enough).

Once you've sorted out your goals, strategy, tactics and what you're going to measure, you'll probably want to pin down a reliable way of measuring those things.

Again, the answer to everything is "it depends"; it depends on what you want to measure. But fret not – it's 2024, so there's an app for everything. (Literally everything.)

Here is our list of the top tools for measuring your PR metrics (and by extension, calculating the success of your PR 🎉 ).

PR KPIs (or evaluation metrics) will vary massively depending on your overall company goals and from campaign to campaign. Here are some of the most tried-and-true methods of PR evaluation. They can be used standalone to inform strategy, or as part of a comprehensive PR report.

The types of methods that you will use will entirely depend on the goals of your business or client and will vary between campaigns. However, knowing your evaluation options will help inform your strategy (and make you seem really good at your job).

Back in the ancient times before the internet (the 1990s), publicists would literally sit around a paper newspaper and cut out media mentions with, I assume, scissors. This allowed them to take the media mention and show it to their supervisors, instead of just saying, "trust me, we were definitely in the newspaper."

We still do this today, but instead of using scissors to cut out pages from the internet, we now use sophisticated software that collects and showcases media mentions. Sort of like digital scissors, but way more expensive!

Today's coverage includes influencer blogs, podcast appearances, YouTube mentions and X.com replies as well as actual print publications or segments on the telly.

There are plenty of services that can help you track your coverage. Brand24 is one we've recommended before, but you could also check out Google Alerts (free!), PR Newswire, Media Tool Kit, and more.

But don't forget. Before you start hankering after getting as much media coverage as possible, you need to plan out what you want to achieve with this coverage and how it aligns with your broader company goals. In short, you need a solid PR strategy.

Here are a few important things to keep in mind when using media coverage as a PR performance metric:

🏋️‍♀️ Bigger isn't always better

Your CEO or your client might want to get their face on the front page of Forbes, but before you make that your primary aim in (working) life you need to ask yourself, will achieving this actually help us reach our campaign goal? If the answer is no, then it's not worth spending your time on – though of course, it can be difficult to persuade the CEO of that.

If you're dealing with a figurehead who desperately believes that a feature in The Financial Times will skyrocket sales (and that figurehead isn't the literal CEO of the FT), chances are high that you won't be able to swing their opinion. In this case, PR goddess Gini Dietrich has a wonderful suggestion – work hard to make it happen and demonstrate IRL that it doesn't do much beyond stroke that person's ego:

🏹 🍏 👧 ​ Targeting is crucial

Every mention you get contributes to your brand awareness. How much it contributes depends on whether or not the publication featuring you resonates with your target audience.

As with all things measurement, strategy is everything.

You need to know ahead of time the people you want to make an impact upon with your campaign, and choose the publications you target accordingly. Use tools likes SparkToro to find out where your audience is spending their time – what sites they're reading, which podcasts they're listening to, who they're following on social media – and pitch those places.

A blog that has 30 dedicated subscribers perfectly suited to your niche is infinitely more valuable to you (and the success of your campaign) than a mention in a national publication whose readers have zero crossover with your target audience.

🐻 🐾 Track the source of your coverage

Can you link the coverage back to your email campaign? Do you have a pre-existing relationship with the author of the coverage? Did it stem from the paid content piece you placed in a niche publication last month?

Knowing why someone covered your story is key to figuring out whether you took the best approach with your PR campaign and will help inform your PR strategy in future.

Despite every reason in the world to not use social media, it is a necessary evil in today's modern PR. Name one company that doesn't use at least some social media. Can you? No, you can't, because they went out of business. Because nobody has ever heard of them. Point made.

Social media plays a key role in creating relationships with audiences, journalists, marketers, and influencers, but it also plays a key role in content distribution. Because of this, it’s important for PR professionals to keep track of social media activity.

Unfortunately, it's no longer enough to just sell things or provide a service or do stuff. There is power in numbers, and people want to see that your business is established, running, and fully engaged online.

That being said, social media is a tricky beast. Social media is complicated, ever-changing, algorithm-based, and often known to throttle businesses (until they pay up). We all have to play by their rules since how users view our content on their platforms is ultimately up to their discretion. This can make social engagement as a reliable metric pretty… unreliable. But this lack of consistency doesn't make it any less important to the majority of businesses, leading social media to be both important and unreliable. A fun and infuriating combination for the whole family!

Thankfully, tracking social engagement isn't that difficult as the socials each have their own set of analytics that you can either compile manually (like our ancestors did) or you can use one of the myriad tools available to do the work for you. If you're part of a PR agency and manage multiple clients, a great tool can be a fantastic way to control the chaos.

What can you track with social media engagement?

• Shares – Who is hyped enough about your content to share it with their audiences?
• "Likes" – Who enjoyed your content enough to give it a good ol' like (or thumbs up, or heart, or whatever LinkedIn is doing)?
• Comments – How much conversation is your content generating?
• Impressions – Who is seeing your content, regardless of the interactions?

Social media PR evaluation is probably one of the easiest metrics to track and report on, though as always, it's up to you to do something sensible with all that data.

Social media is also important for measuring brand reputation, perception, and responding to crises.

There are a variety of free tools available that can help you measure your online reputation, but for clients with more social activity, it’s best to look into a social media monitoring platform. These platforms are great at listening, tracking, and gathering relevant mentions across all social media and provide in-depth metrics for clients.

For example, Small Business Saturday is coming up and you want to see how your client’s branded hashtag will perform against others in the industry. Let’s say the hashtag appeared 300 times compared to 1,200 for the whole market. This equals an SoV of 25% for the market – or 1 in 4 people are talking about their brand.

If you want to dive deeper, you can also look at how people ‘feel’ about your clients’ brand using a social listening platform. These platforms perform something called a sentiment analysis, which basically tells you how many positive, negative, and neutral reactions there are to your branding.

Remember, brands are constantly vying for attention and will use all types of content to one-up competitors. Tracking SoV is a great way to see which brands are controlling the narrative around particular topics, and can be used to create a plan-of-action for plugging your clients’ voice in these topics.

Backlinks are powerful for a few reasons. First, they help with SEO. And SEO matters because the internet controls our every waking minute. The more backlinks you get, the more powerful your website becomes until it is able to gain sentience and eat all the other websites.

Backlinks help establish domain authority by showing the search engines that your content is so good and so fun and funky and fresh that all the other websites trust it enough to give it links. Also, the more people that link to you, the more people will naturally click the link. It's just math.

Let's be honest, does your content suck? And by that I mean, does it not have enough animated gifs?

Content is in a bit of a free-fall these days. Between AI-generated content sucking the lifeforce out of every single syllable on the internet, insanely generic regurgitated churned content, and rapidly shortening attention spans, the art of good content is dying. But thankfully we have a handy-dandy metric to track how much your content sucks: bounce rate!

If your bounce rate is high, it means people just aren't sticking around that long is a great indicator that something about your content isn't quite hitting right. It could be that the content doesn't navigate easily, it's too text-heavy, too dry, or too Already Exists on ChatGPT. No matter what isn't quite working, bounce rate can give you some insightful metrics about how long people are staying engaged.

Any web analytics tool (Plausible, Google Analytics, Amplitude) can help you track your bounce rate if that's what you're using to track your overall site analytics. With Prezly newsrooms being powered by Plausible Analytics, we got you covered.

If SEO is part of your content strategy, ranking highly for the identified keyword is an important indicator that your content is engaging and helpful.

Basically, in very reductionist terms, keyword position is how high your content ranks on the search engines relative to all the other people who are writing about that keyword. The higher the content ranks, the more people see it. The more people see it, the more people click it.

The only real way to control your keyword positioning is to create really, really good content and build links.Gone are the days of aggressive keyword stuffing where some marketing bro named Cliff could create a crappy article and just infuse the keyword 4,000 times. No, you actually have to create good, non-spammy content.

Tools that are most commonly used to measure keyword position are: Ahrefs and SEMRush.

Having a robust email list is a great way to build community, communicate with possible (or current) customers, share more content and inspiration, and eventually convert and create fans out of strangers. A growing subscriber base can be a great indicator that people like your content and want more of it (because they're specifically asking for more of it).

Since we're fans of practicing what we preach, we'd be remiss not to mention our own newsletter! Feel free to subscribe if you'd like more content inspo and marketing goodness.

When you send out an email campaign about an upcoming launch, new press release, company update, or any sort of exciting Business News™️, it's important to know how many people saw that email, clicked it, responded, and otherwise interacted with it. How effective are your email campaigns? If half of your correspondence ends up in the trash, that might be a problem.

Campaign engagement is one of the few PR metrics that you will want to measure for every campaign you send out, because it will tell you two key things about not only this particular campaign, but your approach to email campaigns as a whole.

Email metrics will tell you:

• Whether anyone is actually opening your emails
• If people are opening but taking no further action

Although it's not the most trustworthy metric, knowing the percentage of recipients who are actually opening your email, as well as the number of people who open it and then do not cover your story, will give you a clue as to whether you need to rethink your approach. People aren't opening? Review who you are sending to and your subject line – are both a good fit for your story?

We cover this in more detail in our free guide to email pitching, which comes with a pitching strategy template and some insights from 16 million pitches.

Bonus: If you have a newsroom or digital press kit, consider tracking the number of impressions your stories and assets get. If the web traffic to these pages increases as you run your PR campaign, it will give you an indication that people are interested in your story and downloading your media assets. Conversely, if your campaign is getting opens but there's no one clicking through to your newsroom, it's a decent indication that something in your campaign content is turning them off.

Another relatively simple-to-track metric is website traffic, closely related to keyword ranking. Knowing how your client's website is ranking on the major search engines is more important than ever in terms of getting eyes on the brand.

SEO isn't just for digital marketers anymore (not that there's anything wrong with them, Dave). Things like content marketing and domain authority are crucial to having a chance at ranking with the major search engines. It's very difficult (and time-consuming) to tell a meaningful brand story if nobody can find it.

Pageviews and website visitors are key indicators that your website is on the map, and your brand is out there, getting exposure. Knowing where your views are coming from and which content is getting the most views is extremely useful in deciding what content to continue developing, and what is basically dead in the water.

If you don't consider search and SEO analytics in your overall PR strategy, you're leaving a lot of potential customers on the table. While there is a bit of a learning curve in understanding the basics of SEO, certainly worth investing the time.

You can track your pageviews straight through free tools like Google Search Console. It'll tell you which links are performing best, peak and slow hours, and whether or not your precious content is showing up on Google. The obvious limitation of this, of course, is the fact that it only tracks Google search results. GSC is not super reliable nor helpful for traffic from other sources, like direct links, social links, etc.

Many CMS (Content Management Systems) will have their own integrated analytics. Prezly uses an integration with Plausible Analytics for our users' analytics because of its commitment to privacy. Not bragging or anything, just sharing a fun fact that also happens to be brag-worthy.

Depending on the goals of your campaign, there are a few different figures you could look at.

New visitors

An influx of new visitors to specific pages that are related to your campaign could point to increased awareness for your brand. Be careful to look at this metric alongside any SEO work your marketing team may be doing to get a clear picture of what's causing the uptick in new traffic.

Referral traffic

From distributing press releases to running social media campaigns, your content is reaching many corners of the web. But, as any digital marketer knows, not all of these channels will yield the same traffic results.

People engage with content differently based on the platform that’s being used, and it’s up to your team to know which type of content your audience prefers. One way to measure this is through referral traffic.

Ahrefs is a great tool for tracking site referrals as well as general SEO site value.

Referral traffic is any traffic that comes from an external source, like blog posts, case studies, social media, and more. By measuring referral traffic, you’ll be able to refine campaigns and create hyper-personalised, high-performing content for your clients. Most digital analytics tools today can easily measure referral traffic for your team.

Obviously, for most businesses, conversion is the goal. Getting people to buy what you're selling through the power of content is the ideal scenario. Sure, content can help with SEO, brand awareness, community engagement, and those other fun buzzwords, but if your content can actually sell? Well, that's fantastic, and you should keep doing more of that.

Conversion rates can be tracked through whatever analytics system your business has set up, including Google Analytics, Mixpanel

A conversion will look different depending on the type of content that’s being pitched. For example, if your client is an author, a conversion may be the total number of book purchases that came from your digital ads. If your client is a small e-commerce store, a conversion may be the total signups from your welcome email marketing.

Google Analytics is one of many tools to offer customisable conversion tracking

Keeping tabs on total conversions and conversion rates is an important complement to referral traffic. After all, clients want to know that content is influencing more than just traffic numbers.

Seems a little obvious, but how many sales did your PR generate? Typically, companies like money. And they like ways to make more money. Because if there's no money, there's no company. So, how many trials, conversions, and sign-ups did you generate?

While it's impossible to completely and accurately attribute sales to PR efforts, there should be obvious indicators of trends. If your PR campaign had no correlation to any increases in sales (and one of the goals was to increase sales), it might be worth reflecting more on the tactics you're using and metrics you're measuring, and switching up the campaign.

As with many of PR's favorite metrics, direct attribution can be tricky. However, it is certainly possible to make a connection between a PR campaign launching and an increase (or decrease) in sales. If you release a new ad campaign and two days later, sales absolutely plummet through the ceiling, well...

There are services like Ahrefs and Google Analytics that can help give you insights into where your traffic is coming from and if it is associated with any PR campaigns. Tracking how you target your PR may give further insights into how those campaigns converted to customers. Or, if the mystery is too great, you could simply ask your new customers how they found out about your service or product.

You can check your own site's domain authority and that of others by using the Moz toolbar, affectionately called the MozBar (this feature is available even on their free account).

Domain authority is measured on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being the lowest score and 100 being the highest. This metric describes how relevant a website’s content is for a particular subject. A low score means your content is hardly visible on search engines and needs to be optimized, a high score means your content is very visible on search engines and is likely getting more traffic. (It’s worth noting that domain authority was originally developed by Moz to give an indication of how well the site is likely to perform in search rankings, and so while helpful, is not the ultimate indication of domain health.)

Source: moz.com

There are a number of SEO tools out there that’ll provide a snapshot of your domain authority score right now and used along with Google Analytics can provide a great picture of your traffic.

Getting backlinks from your PR outreach is one of the best ways to boost domain authority and drive traffic to your clients’ content. When doing link outreach, make sure you’re pitching content to relevant, authoritative sources, and personalise each message to increase the chances of acquiring links.

For example, if you have a client in the healthcare industry, you wouldn’t pitch their content to sports editors. So, take time to refine your outreach lists and databases, and be sure to emphasise outreach personalisation across your team.

You may be wondering why AVE didn't make the above metrics list.

I'm sorry if this hits too close to home, but it's 2024 – we have billionaires whizzing into space every few minutes and driverless vans running down children in Arizona (note to self: fact check). Only the most insecure of gentlemen care about the number of inches their story wins in a print publication.

AVE – or ad value equivalency – is one PR metric you should throw straight in the trash.

It's something that the top cats at AMEC saw to be so detrimental to the PR industry that they condemned its use. Then the Chartered Institute of Public Relations took it a step further and said any member using AVEs would be banned from the organization.

Instead? Try something like estimated coverage views from our friends over at Coveragebook. Instead of equating the value of your coverage based on how much the same amount of ad space would cost (which is a bananas idea on many levels, least of all perceived authenticity), ECV estimates the number of impressions that your coverage is likely to achieve – giving you a figure that is not only way more sensible than AVE, but which is more easily comparable with other metrics that c-suite will be looking at – say, marketing analytics.

But again, it's up to you to work out whether measuring ECV will help you achieve your project goals.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in HR or PR, more teams have become metric-driven in the digital age. Metrics allow us to focus and measure, refine and personalise, and most importantly, they allow us to attribute success more accurately.

Are PR metrics perfect?

No.

But neither are people. We do things that make no sense and can be difficult to quantify, no matter how many different ways Zuckerberg and Bezos find to track us. People do weird things that we can't explain with data and numbers.

Does this mean we get to throw in the towel and say, "the heart of man is vast and unknowable, as deep as the ocean and just as complicated. We don't know why he won't click on our tweet about bubblegum flavored energy drinks, so we don't need to bother."

Not necessarily. You may not get perfect tracking and attribution, but you certainly should at least try and do the most that you can with the tools you have.

While there is no limit to the content metrics you could track, picking a few to focus on is typically suggested over tracking everything and learning nothing. Ultimately, what you choose to track should depend on your end goals. Are you trying to convert? Gain exposure? Increase traffic through SEO? Just have a few shiny new high scores to save on the refrigerator?

So, whether you’re using the PR metrics above or your own set of content metrics that you find in your PR software stack, make sure your team adopts and applies metric-driven mentalities. You owe it to your clients and the months of hard work spent on PR and digital marketing collateral.

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