There is no doubt about the fact that PR adds value to your brand, helps increase brand awareness and build a strong presence for you in the industry. But for a long time PR pros and experts have struggled to find a way to evaluate the success PR can bring. 

Measuring PR success is not as simple as other evaluations. PR and advertising are in many ways similar, but are also different in many ways. To measure the impact of a news story is not as easy as identifying how many people saw a particular ad. So is there a way to measure the success of PR? Yes! First, let’s understand what PR metrics are: 

What are PR metrics?

PR Measurement or metrics measure the impact of a campaign or an initiative. In simple words, PR metrics means putting numbers behind a campaign’s performance. 

Why tracking PR metrics is important

• To validate efforts to clients and supervisors
  It is no secret that proving ROI is very important for PR professionals who have to report back to their supervisors. The importance of ROI is a great deal for every organization.
  
• To refine future PR campaigns
  As stated before, the measurement of PR and communications can be difficult. But when there is a lack of data, it means that you don’t know how to rate the success. In PR ideation and brainstorming, you spend countless hours and energy, don’t you think you should be sure that you are on the right track? 

How to measure PR success

Before beginning, you need to set clear goals and objectives. It will help you determine the best PR metrics for measuring the success of your approach. In simple terms, determining the success of PR campaigns for a startup is going to be vastly different from that of an established or a large organization. The crisis management plans may be entirely different for a small organization or a startup but for a large organization, the plan is wide and requires a lot of attention. 

It is true that certain objectives you set may never be measurable, but others may be easy to track. 

Press clips 

When your brand gets a mention in a reputed media outlet after they received your pitch. One traditional way to evaluate the success of PR is to track the number of press clips that mention your brand. This isn’t time consuming. 

When a leading outlet publishes your pitch, 4-5 local publications will use that information to create a story and you get your mention! This gives your brand the exposure it needs. 

Another method to evaluate the success of PR is to notice whether your sales hit high whenever a good story reaches out to the public. These engagement analytics you’ll want to share. 

Another way PR can help is when a reputed outlet posts a video about your company’s working culture. You may get some new hiring options and people would want to join. It’s a great boost for you. 

Media impressions  

Media impression calculation is the estimate of the number of people who have heard about your organization or brand in a specific time period and is an efficient PR measuring method. 

For this calculation, multiply the number of press clips within a particular period by the circulation of each publication. Keep in mind t

hat media impressions are not accurate. A publication might have a circulation of 1 million impressions, but its not necessary that each one of them read your piece. 

Social media engagement

This is a digital era and now social media plays a very important role. 69% of journalists say that they definitely track the number of times their story was shared. Likes, comments, mentions, shares are important to determine the project success. Social media metrics can be tracked from the backend of each of these platforms. For example, on Twitter, you can track tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions or counts. Top tweets can also be seen. Email is also a great way to gain brand recognition. 

Email tracking can be through open rates, click through rates and conversion rates. The metrics depend on your goals and objectives. 

Calculating the PR value of a media clip

PR value is sometimes also calculated by multiplying advertising rates by the page percentage your placement covers. For this calculation, you will have to  pull the advertising rates from a publication’s media kit (likely available on their website). The PR pros believe that this method is not accurate and effective but since we are stating the possible methods, this one is also used by some. 

Traffic and measuring backlinks

Using tools like Google Analytics is an effective tracking method. This helps look for an increase in traffic to your website or a blog post or any content related to your brand, be it an announcement or an offer you posted on your landing page. Tools like Google Analytics help you track unique visitors, session duration, traffic source etc. 

Now that you know why you should track PR success, will you go ahead and keep track? We say YES!