How to measure the success of a public relations campaign

An effective public relations campaign can bring invaluable business and attention to a brand.

PR and marketing professionals need a way to accurately assess the performance of their campaigns. The industry has long held on to metrics such as Return on Investment (ROI) or Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), but modern PR campaigns require a holistic assessment of your strategy to be effective. 

We outline some of the best metrics you can use to evaluate your PR campaign’s success, and explore how tools can streamline this process. 

1. Press Hits

One of the most direct, measurable forms of tracking the progress of a PR campaign is to track the number of press hits you’ve received. If your campaign has been mentioned in blogs, newspapers and websites, you're able to track not just the number of hits, but the tone, narratives and outcomes of your campaign. It is vital that these press hits are also of quality, as merely having a high number of mentions may not lead to meaningful engagement with your brand. Tracking these hits is the first step towards measuring effectiveness.

2. Engagement Metrics

Many marketing and PR teams look at how PR efforts increase website traffic. Tools such as Google Analytics help to assess how people are responding to their content. It is important to identify your desired outcomes and goals for your campaign, and set realistic goals for these metrics. Whether you are measuring page views, the number of active users, or actual conversions on your website, these metrics are integral in helping you determine whether you are on track, where you can improve, and where you’ve found success.  

3. Share of Voice

Another method of measuring the success of a PR campaign is to gauge the “Share of Voice”.  A business’s share of voice encompasses how much that business is talked about in the public sphere compared to its competitors. If your share of voice is increasing, your business or brand is becoming more popular and gaining more traction. Assessing success based on share of voice is beneficial because it can show you where your business stands in comparison to others, but it is important to note that other metrics must be used as well. Simply dominating the share of voice, while valuable to know, doesn’t indicate positive sentiment or coverage of your campaign.

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Using PeakMetrics to evaluate your campaign

There are a plethora of useful tools you can use and insights you can gain about your PR campaign using PeakMetrics. 

Real-Time Alerts

Track the topics and trends that relate to your campaign using the Alerts feature. Our service continuously combs through millions of news sites and blogs, social media platforms, and even TV/Radio in order to automatically notify you when your brand is mentioned. In addition, you are able to import Google Alerts and other tools in order to seamlessly track your brand’s product in one place. In order to stay up-to-date on your campaign, you can choose to get hourly, daily and weekly reports on press coverage. This feature simplifies the process of manually tracking press hits, and ensures you receive the full picture of your campaign’s performance.  You can even get your alerts in tools you use, such as Slack.

Daily Briefs

If you want to compile your press hits and media mentions in a digestible manner to better inform others of the performance of your PR campaign, the Daily Briefs feature is just for you. Simply use PeakMetrics to choose pertinent press hits to share with others, add contacts to the email and even add a customized message. This sleek and in-depth report will allow others to easily gauge the success of your campaign and stay in the loop. 

There are dozens of tried and tested methods of assessing the success of a PR campaign. Whether tracking media mentions and press hits, measuring the engagement with your website or gauging your share of voice, measuring the success of your campaign is easier (and more fun) with PeakMetrics. 

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Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash