CHAPTER 11

Measurement

The efforts of PR can be wasted, if the outcome is not measured effectively and when you are a small business, charity, or organization you want to ensure that you are getting value for money and not wasting your time. If you are not measuring content and its success, how can you really tell the impact that your PR plan is having? This question has plagued PR for years, partially the fault of PR practitioners for not demonstrating that their efforts actually changed behaviors in the way intended (Michaelson and Stacks 2017).

The Research, Measurement, and Evaluation Conundrum1

Until recently only elementary and basic research was conducted on the effect of PR campaigns. Press clippings, for instance, let you know that the information was presented in some media, but not that anyone was impacted by it—that they were now aware of the issue, problem, or product—how and what they felt about those topics after being presented a message through the media—whether it added to their the knowledge to make a decision to act in the way intended—whether or not they would advocate for the issue, problem solution, or product (a major outcome of PR is what has been called the “third-person effect” whereby others than the clients or business express to their own circle of friends something, hopefully positive, about it—and, finally, behave as the campaign was designed to do (Stacks 2017).

Understanding that PR attempts to establish an expectation for behavior is important when deciding how to collect the data to measure and evaluate a PR effort, whether a single event or a long-term campaign. Michaelson and Stacks (2017) suggest that PR should measure five basic outcomes in any campaign (see Figure 11.1). They call this outcome model B.A.S.I.C—measuring whether the campaign has built awareness, advanced knowledge, sustained relevance, initiated action, and actually created advocacy as planned. These are tied to the PR campaign’s three primary objectives: (1) informational—get the information out to build awareness and advance knowledge; (2) motivational—sustain relevance of newly created attitudes and beliefs and lead the audience to initiate action; and (3) behavioral—both advocate for the campaign and then actually do what the campaign asked them to do.

Figure 11.1 The basic model and communication objectives

What this does is establish behavioral outcomes that can be correlated to parts of your campaign to demonstrate effectiveness (and to provide benchmarks against which test to ensure your campaign is on phase and on target). Michaelson and Stacks (2017) call this “end-to-end” PR and creates a return on expectations (ROE) model that can predict return on PR investment (ROI). Li and Stacks (2015) demonstrated, for instance, that investment in social media (see Chapter 6) can be demonstrated to impact on business (financial) outcomes.

Collecting Data

Data collected to measure outcomes takes many forms. It may be simply measuring column inches or TV airtime or social media KPIs (key performance indicators). It may be more sophisticated and include content analysis of others’ pickup of your messages and forwarding them to their followers and readers (i.e., a third-person effect). It may involve bringing together focus groups to better understand how your messages are being received. Or, it may involve survey research where random samples from audiences, publics, and stakeholder groups are queried regarding the campaign. While the first method is inexpensive, the other more sophisticated methods can become very expensive.

Triple A’s

As noted, measuring PR can also help see what content was interesting and relevant, helping to guide future PR initiatives and campaigns. To be able to measure your PR success, there are three key factors I consider important, and I call them “Triple A’s” and are:

1. Audience—Who do you want to reach? As specific as stakeholders or more generally as audiences, or, even larger, publics?
2. Awareness—What is your message? What do you want to achieve?
3. Action—What do you want the target audience to do after communications?

Once the aforementioned has been defined, you will know what you want to measure. But how do we, actually, quantify success? How do we actually measure the value of PR?

Well, years ago, irrespective where you were based (and is something my own teams have done in the past, to measure the PR value/success of a campaign), PR professionals would sit with a ruler and a bundle of newspapers, measuring the size and space of a piece of coverage. Yes, imagine that?! We would then use that information to measure something called the advertising, value equivalent (AVE) of that space. It was a long tedious job.

Yet, while the measurement of PR value has moved on since the days of literal interpretation of “column inches,” the use of AVE still remains commonplace for many people who want an inexpensive way to indicate “success.”

Advertising, Value Equivalent (AVE)

AVE refers to the cost of buying the space taken up by a particular article, had the article been an advertisement. AVE figures are still popular in some parts of the industry, because it is an easy way to show how much value you can get from PR. It is argued that AVE is a way to explain the value of PR to people who may not be familiar with marketing and media, when justifying investment in PR activity.

It refers to the number of people exposed to the coverage and whether people have had repeated exposure. It is considered an important qualifying measure, where the effectiveness of a campaign is dependent on the number of times a person sees it.

Yet, there has always been a big debate around the real value and meaning of AVE, which has raged on for years. However, even prior to the global recession in 2008, along with the beginnings of social media at the same time that greatly impacted the print media, advertising fell and, consequently, affected AVE. The European AMEC (https://amecorg.com/amecframework/) and the US Institute for Public Relations (https://instituteforpr.org/ipr-measurement-commission/) joined forces and issued in what is called the “Barcelona Principles” (https://instituteforpr.org/barcelona-principles-2-0-updated-2015/), a call for discontinuance of AVE as a valid measure of PR success. However, neither organization has offered a replacement metric of success.

How We Measure PR Today

Thankfully, PR measurement has evolved (no more sitting around with rulers!) and now the way we report about the success of PR efforts has changed significantly. It has become more important to measure the effects of PR, what target audiences now think, say, and do after exposure to PR, than it is to provide a financial mark of activity. Evaluation is now about message drive, delivery, and gaining a positive behavioral response. From media impressions to key message placement, there are a number of ways to measure the success of PR campaigns depending on your aims and objectives.

These are smarter, cost-effective, and fruitful ways to track and measure the success of a PR campaign. With the advent of social media, it is now possible to track your success. Here are some tools.

Using Social Media

We now know that social media has become an integral part of all PR campaigns and important part of engagement, helping you understand the tone and reach of your posts. Most communication campaigns focus on creating content that people want to talk about and share on social channels, increasing the importance of measuring the impact of social media.

Social media measurement tools have evolved extensively and there are many ways it can be measured; and all the social media platforms—LinkedIn, Facebook Page, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram—have their own free analytics, which shows you the engagement, reach, and tone of your posts.

While there is still value in measuring awareness of and engagement with your brand through the number of likes, comments, retweets, replies, and shares, the real payoff is measuring how these likes and shares turn into sales. Traffic driven to your site can be measured through tracking URL shares, clicks, and conversions; share of voice can be measured by tracking activity compared to that of competitors, so you can understand where your business/brand falls in the hierarchy.

Case Studies

For a global small “health therapy” business, we have been able to determine how different messages and channels of communication are affecting their reputation. We found what types of facts and information are important to drive influencers to speak and create conversations about them.

While working for a book publishing house, we determined if social media was driving sales. As it turned out there was no direct effect on sales, but Twitter was driving website visits and in turn these website visits drove sales.

At a leading breast cancer charity, we were able to isolate the impact of volunteer fundraising from various channels such as radio advertising and direct mailings. We found that we could raise more money for breast cancer research, if we began to shift more money toward online earned media.

As noted earlier, use of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has been demonstrated to impact on corporate bottom line, both financially and socially (Li and Stacks 2015).

Website Traffic and Google Analytics

Website traffic provides an excellent way to see how well a PR campaign did, as measuring web traffic before (establishing a baseline) and after a campaign launch can help determine the PR campaign’s success against baseline and benchmarks. Many businesses use website traffic and page views as a way to measure their success/impact.

Straightforward visitor numbers tell part of the story, but you should also drill down into web traffic by evaluating demographics including age group, location, and device (e.g., laptop, mobile phone, and tablet) to ensure you are reaching your target audience or specific stakeholder group. It is also important to measure where website traffic originates from to establish which sites and social media networks send the most traffic and create the most value for your brand.

A rise in new unique visitors indicates that brand awareness has grown, but it is also important to monitor returning visitor numbers—a good indication that brand trust has developed.

Engaging content, such as blog posts, infographics, and videos, encourages return visits and ensures your audience relies on your brand for inspiration or the latest information.

Another important web metric is “goal conversions” and this is whether their associated objectives are subscriptions, form completions, or e-commerce transactions; conversions enable you to track value of PR; if the PR campaign reaches the right target audience, it should increase the number of conversions or qualified leads.

Google Analytics

As discussed in Chapter 6, Google Analytics can help businesses and other organizations evaluate their PR efforts, giving a much more holistic overview about target audiences. The platform is arguably one of the most powerful tools to learn about your digital efforts and gain a better understanding of how PR is working with other marketing initiatives to achieve your objectives. It expands your measurement capabilities, offering additional insights into audience needs and online behaviors. Armed with these insights, you will be able to test new campaigns and tactics, and fine-tune for success. Here are some Google Analytics tips for tracking KPI activity and understanding your target audiences’ behaviors:

Annotations—Google Analytics has a feature that allows you to insert annotations, or notes, for specific events. Use this feature to note the dates of when you send media releases, land a big piece of earned coverage, post a blog, launch a social campaign, or distribute an e-mail newsletter. Ideally, you will be able to correlate spikes in website traffic to a specific activity, or set of activities, taking place in the same timeframe. This can be a helpful metric to not only see how all of your marketing efforts are working together, but also whether or not the combined efforts are successful.

Referral Traffic—Looking at referral traffic can be useful to determine which outlets are driving traffic from earned coverage. This metric also provides insight into which social media platforms are successfully sending audiences to your website for additional information, which can help refine your content strategy. Having diverse traffic sources improves search engine optimization (SEO). Keep an eye on organic and search traffic to ensure you have a good mix of sources. This will help protect your site’s overall performance should a search engine algorithm change.

New and Returning Visitors—It is important to understand if you are speaking to an existing audience or reaching a new audience. For example, a high percentage of returning visitors could be ideal for a regular blog post, as it indicates that the content is resonating with your readers, encouraging them to come back frequently for the latest posts. Whereas a lead-driven business would benefit from a high percentage of new visitors. Understanding this metric can help you determine how your content is performing and if a new direction is needed.

The Bigger Picture—Look at clicks and a user’s digital footprint to see where they go after reading a blog post or press release. If someone is only on the site for a few seconds and clicked on eight different articles, it could be a sign they are not finding what they need, and it is time for a content strategy rethink.

Looking at multiple metrics helps tell a more comprehensive story about your users and what they need or want from your digital efforts.

Backlinks—Backlinks are among the most important factors in achieving high search engine ranking and boost your SEO, which increases web traffic. Gaining better search engine placement is a key measure of successful PR activity.

Google assigns greater value to legitimate backlinks from authoritative sources and your PR efforts can be critical in obtaining those backlinks through innovative and engaging content. The number of backlinks is a good metric for understanding if your audience finds your content relevant, useful, and valuable. After all, it is every business/brand’s goal to appear on page one of Google!

Keywords

Keyword rankings can be used to measure specific terms you are trying to rank for and, if you do not rank for your most relevant keywords, your organic website traffic will decrease. This will affect lead generation and ultimately sales and revenue. Measuring keyword rankings enables you to ensure you’re targeting the right keywords and to determine if your brand’s page rank is improving over time. As you gain more backlinks, your site becomes more trusted.

Do-It-Yourself Media Monitoring

Another way to measure campaigns is to physically count the number of articles your organization’s name appears and is the simplest measure for quantifying the success of a PR campaign. You can pay for this service, but if on a budget you can do this yourself manually.

Knowing the number of stories (or hits) your company generates and how those numbers stack up against the competition offers an insight of how your business is viewed by the media you are targeting. This do-it-yourself method has its advantages in terms of cost and connection to the news (all good PR people should monitor their media space). However, this method is extremely time-consuming and usually not comprehensive enough.

A step up from physically clipping articles is using online tools to create alerts for specific keywords, such as your company or product’s name. Google, Yahoo!, and many news sites use something known as Rich Site Summary or commonly referred to as RSS feeds, and offer these services for free. Most deliver clips from at least a few sources, although they vary in selectivity, sensitivity, and range.

Web alerts are likely to grab articles that are not always pertinent, so you need to review each clip for relevance.

Clipping Services

Clipping services provide the best means for accurately and efficiently tracking coverage and is a paid for service, which can be costly. However, for a company intent on monitoring news coverage and determining their PR efforts, the expense is justified. Before the advent of the Internet, clipping services were staffed by individuals who would read, clip, and mail each individual article to their client; and over the years I have subscribed for this service when working for large organizations. When you received the articles, you would then have to manually catalog each piece of news.

These services are still available today, but the cost and unwieldiness make this option unattractive to most business owners. However, electronic clipping services provide a balance between accuracy, efficiency, and timeliness. Such services offer companies the ability to track a huge variety of media, including print, TV, and online sources. The best clipping services can scan tens of thousands of media outlets within a short time period and then deliver reports to your inbox on a continuous basis or as daily reports.

Electronic clipping services can be programmed to monitor a multitude of company names, keywords, and phrases. This gives you the opportunity to have them track not only your own coverage, but also that of your competitors and your industry. This kind of industry awareness can help you react quickly to unusual events and potentially alter your communication strategy as a result. Some clipping services will prioritize coverage based on publication type, readership, and geographic region. This additional data can be quite useful in assessing the impact of your coverage.

Market Surveys

One impartial way to demonstrate a change in perception could be an online poll of 1,000 people. Depending on your PR campaign, surveys can be used prior to the launch of your PR campaign to understand the current awareness and perceptions of the brand. Awareness statistics that trend upward will certainly prove the value of PR activity. However, commissioning and analyzing this kind of research can be expensive.

Trade Shows and Speaking Event Measurement

Sometimes, your PR activity might be staging trade shows, holding special events, meetings, and involvement in speakers’ programs. For shows and events, obviously one possible output measure is an assessment of total attendance, not just an actual count of those who showed up, but an assessment of the types of individuals present, the number of interviews that were generated, and conducted in connection with the event, and the number of promotional materials that were distributed.

Summary

Ultimately, measuring the effectiveness of PR activity stems from having solid PR objectives from which success can be measured. To have the greatest impact on business results, PR must be measured to determine where it can be improved, and what its return on efforts, time, and investment really is. Each of the metrics mentioned in this chapter will not give a full picture of how successful a PR campaign has been on their own, but when combined and cited against your business objectives you will clearly see the effectiveness of your PR activity.

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