Ask an agency how a campaign performed and you will usually receive a number of impressions, a reach figure and possibly an \u00abadvertising value equivalent\u00bb. None of those tells you whether anything changed, which is why they are popular.<\/p>\n
Impressions and reach<\/strong> measure how many people theoretically could have seen something. They are inputs. Reporting them as results is like a factory reporting electricity consumed.<\/p>\n Advertising value equivalent<\/strong> prices your coverage as though you had bought the equivalent advertising space. It has been discredited for decades and persists because it produces a large number. It also implies coverage and advertising are interchangeable, which is precisely the confusion good PR exists to avoid.<\/p>\n Article count<\/strong> rewards volume and is trivially inflated by paid distribution. Twenty syndicated copies of one release is one thing that happened.<\/p>\n Sentiment scores<\/strong> are usually automated, usually wrong on anything nuanced, and encourage optimising for a metric that does not correspond to how anyone actually read the piece.<\/p>\n Pick the five companies you are genuinely compared against and the publications your buyers actually read. Track what proportion of coverage in that defined space is yours. It is bounded, comparable over time, and it corresponds to a real question: are we becoming more or less prominent among the people who matter?<\/p>\n The most underused measure in PR. Take the two or three things you needed the market to understand and check whether coverage actually said them. Being mentioned in a piece that describes you incorrectly is not a win, and it is invisible in every impression-based report.<\/p>\n Score it crudely \u2014 did the piece carry the core message, partially carry it, or miss it. Even a rough version reveals whether your messaging is landing or whether reporters are reaching for their own framing.<\/p>\n Are the conversations you are now having with better counterparties? Are partners approaching you rather than the reverse? Are candidates citing something they read? This is qualitative and it is the measure senior people actually care about, so collect it deliberately rather than anecdotally.<\/p>\n The closest reliable proxy for whether more of the right people know you exist. It is unglamorous, it lags, and it is much harder to game than anything on a media report.<\/p>\n A report that blends earned coverage with paid distribution is not a report, it is a defence. They are different products with different costs and completely different signal value to a reader.<\/p>\n Every report we produce splits them, and the ratio is frequently the most useful line in the document.<\/p>\n The mechanism that makes all of this work is agreeing, before the campaign, what it is for and what would count as success. Without that, measurement becomes a search for a chart that looks good, which is a search that always succeeds.<\/p>\n Acceptable objectives are specific: be understood as the default option for a named use case among a named audience; shift the framing of a recurring criticism; establish a spokesperson as a reference point on a specific subject. \u00abIncrease awareness\u00bb is not an objective, it is a mood.<\/p>\n A campaign report with no underperformance in it is not credible. Every programme has components that did not work, and identifying them is the only mechanism by which the next one is better. An agency that never reports a miss is either not looking or not telling you.<\/p>\nWhat to measure instead<\/h2>\n
Share of voice against a named competitor set<\/h3>\n
Message pull-through<\/h3>\n
Inbound quality<\/h3>\n
Branded search volume<\/h3>\n
Separate earned from paid, always<\/h2>\n
Set the objective before you start<\/h2>\n
Report the failures<\/h2>\n