Tracking your media hits is one thing—measuring the impact they have clients/sales/your business is another.
This is a question I’ve wrestled with—and continue to wrestle with. How can PR pros track the impact of each media placement on overall sales, brand awareness, and other factors? How can we show that PR delivers meaningful results to our executives or clients?
In my experience, this is a notoriously difficult question.
As PR pros, we need to look at the bigger picture. PR is not an end in itself—it is meant to propel business goals forward. Drive sales. Cultivate brand awareness. Boost reputation.
But how do we measure this?
As a publicist with Baker Publishing Group, an independent Christan book publisher—I am constantly looking to land coverage in outlets that drive the most book sales possible. The more books we sell, the more profitable we are—and if we can show the connection between PR and sales (or any other metric)—then we can further show our value to the organization.
Tracking Awareness/Reach
One way to track your awareness and reach is through a website called similarweb.com. This is especially helpful for online publications.
Similarweb allows you to track total visits, bounce rate, pages per visit, average visit duration, traffic trends, geography targeting, audience demographics, etc. of almost any prominent website.
I have had issues with this platform not tracking smaller sites, so just be aware of that.
If you use Cision, this site is what calculated the “UVPM (Unique Visitors Per Month)” metric on each outlet.
This can help give your clients an overview of the outlets you’ve placed (and their total reach) but cannot show you a specific article analysis.
The issue here, however, is that we cannot point to one specific article placement that drives other key performance indicators (sales, etc.)—but this is a good resource nonetheless.
Other Ways to Track Your PR
- Coupon Codes: If your client has a product or service, coupon codes can be a good way to track effectiveness. This way, you can see which outlets are driving sales of said product or service.
- Monitor Website Traffic: Did your client receive a boost in website traffic after an article placement?
- New Customers: Talk to clients’ new customers—how did they hear about their brand? On TV? Maybe a podcast or radio show?
This will vary from organization to organization, and it is best to assess what your team’s goals are.
How do you track your PR efforts? Let’s start a discussion.
Leave a comment, and let’s start a discussion.
