Measuring PR Success: Key Metrics and KPIs to Watch

Public relations is instrumental in helping organizations establish and maintain a positive image. In the landscape of modern communications, analyzing the effectiveness of PR campaigns is imperative. However, just counting your media mentions isn’t enough in today’s world; organizations may have many KPIs that are imperative to their PR strategy and overall business goals. 

We have a rundown on some important metrics and KPIs in the world of PR that offer a nuanced understanding of the impact and effectiveness of each PR campaign you launch. 

Trackable Outcomes

Referral Link Traffic

Referral link traffic refers to the visitors who find your website through external links on other websites. These links act as referrals, directing users from one website to another. Referral traffic is a key metric in web analytics and can help you assess the impact of your PR efforts on brand perception, awareness, and reputation. 

Referral traffic offers insights into what sources are driving visitors to your website and the effectiveness of your partnerships and collaborations, and it can help you evaluate the impact of your content marketing efforts. While referral link traffic is important, remember that it’s just one piece of your overall analytic puzzle. 

Website Traffic

Your website traffic indicates the number of visitors to your website that are specifically attributed to a PR campaign. This is another key metric because it demonstrates your campaign’s impact on your business goals and other potential opportunities. 

However, there are a couple of key considerations when evaluating the effectiveness of campaigns in bringing traffic to your website. Some metrics to consider include: 

• Page views: the total number of pages viewed on your website.
• Unique visitors: the number of distinct individuals who visit your website.
• Sessions: the interactions a user takes on your website within a specified time. 

You can use tools like Google Analytics to collect your website’s traffic data. Additionally, customizing your analytics dashboard helps you focus on the key metrics that align with your business and PR goals. 

Social media engagement

Your social media engagement metric is the likes, shares, comments, and other interactions your branded accounts receive. Calculating your social media engagement metric is important because it reflects audience engagement and sentiment. 

To calculate social media engagement, you’ll need to identify key engagement actions, whether they are likes, shares, comments, retweets, or whatever action is most important to your business. Calculating your total engagement requires you to sum up all individual counts for each engagement action. Then, use this formula: 

Engagement rate = total engagement/total followers or impressions x 100. 

Brand mentions

Brand mentions indicate the frequency with which your brand is mentioned in various forms of media. This metric indicates the level of awareness and interest that is generated by your PR campaigns. You should use media monitoring tools like Google Alerts or Mention to help you track your mentions. Categorize your mentions based on their nature, such as positive, negative, or neutral, where sentiment analysis is relevant. Remember to regularly update your mention collection and review your mentions over time to identify trends and patterns while considering seasonality, campaign launches, or other events that may influence your mention volume. 

Total Media Coverage

Media coverage serves as a crucial metric for evaluating both the quantity and, equally importantly, the quality of attention your campaigns attract. This metric allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your media outreach initiatives and assess the prominence of your brand in various media outlets. When calculating media coverage, it becomes essential to not only quantify the number of mentions but also scrutinize the qualitative aspects of these mentions.

Two pivotal metrics in assessing the quality of media coverage are the clip count, which represents the total number of media mentions, and the media type, which involves categorizing mentions by their format, such as online articles, TV commercials, print features, and more. The emphasis on quality ensures a comprehensive understanding of how positively or negatively your brand is portrayed in the media.

For PR teams, monitoring media coverage is a fundamental practice, yet it necessitates a deeper exploration into additional key metrics. By delving into both the quantity and quality dimensions of media coverage, organizations can better discern the overall success of their media coverage strategy, allowing for more informed strategic adjustments and improvements.

Web Traffic Conversions

Your web traffic conversions are the number of visitors on your website who complete your desired action or conversion. This might be making a purchase, filling out a form, signing up for your newsletter, or whatever other action aligns with the goals of your PR campaign. This is a crucial metric to track because it directly correlates your efforts with tangible outcomes and business objectives. 

This metric helps your PR team assess the effectiveness of PR campaigns in driving engagement and completing conversions on your website. These conversions are often aligned with your broader business objectives, like lead generation, sales, or brand awareness. This metric also helps inform your team about audience behaviors by showing not just how many people you reached but also how many are taking additional steps in the right direction, so you can effectively tailor future PR efforts to better resonate with your audience. 

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis involves analyzing your mentions to determine their sentiment toward your brand. Your parameters for categorizing sentiment may vary depending on the nature of your campaigns and industry, but generally, they’re grouped as positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment analysis is especially useful for B2C and service-based businesses and provides insights into the public’s perception of your brand. 

Share of voice

This metric helps you calculate your position in the market compared to your competitors. Share of voice is your brand’s presence compared to your competitors, helping you assess your brand’s visibility relative to others in the industry. 

To calculate your share of voice, calculate your brand mentions and your industry mentions, which is the total number of mentions in your industry or market. You can use media monitoring tools to track and collect data on your brand mentions and competitors’ mentions in overall industry conversations. 

Use this formula to calculate the share of voice: 

Share of Voice = (brand mentions/total industry mentions) x 100

Key metrics in the world of PR

In the ever-evolving world of PR, the ability to quantify your successes and misses is instrumental in refining your strategy, optimizing resources, and maintaining a favorable public image. From media impressions and brand mentions to crisis management, in modern PR, you need a diverse toolkit to gauge your success. With a vigilant eye on these key metrics, you can thrive in this nuanced landscape of public perception and communication. 

Megan Isola

Megan Isola holds a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality and a minor in Business Marketing from Cal State University Chico. She enjoys going to concerts, trying new restaurants, and hanging out with friends.