You can't improve what you don't measure. And unfortunately for the world of public relations, a lot of the campaigns that PR pros do are considered nice to have rather than essential.
The key reason? You're not evaluating the success of your PR efforts.
And even when PR teams measure something, it's most often vanity metrics (such as AVE) rather than tangible ones such as ROI and their impact on a business's bottom line.
PR evaluation techniques help in-house PR teams and agencies accurately report on the results of their PR work, refine their strategies, demonstrate the value they provide, and improve overall communication with stakeholders.
Today, we show you everything you need to know about public relations evaluation.
What is PR evaluation?
PR evaluation is the process of assessing how impactful and effective a PR campaign is. For PR teams and businesses, evaluating PR efforts means understanding if the campaigns achieve their desired goals—for example, increased brand awareness, improved reputation, better brand sentiment, etc.
Over time, PR evaluation has evolved from outdated metrics such as AVE to modern performance PR KPIs focusing on actionable outcomes.
The role of PR evaluation is to help PR professionals shape their strategies, optimize their campaigns, and show justification for their budgets in front of clients or in-house management.
Two core techniques of PR evaluation
There are two main evaluation models if you're wondering how to evaluate a PR campaign. They are great in isolation, but you should use both public relations evaluation methods to evaluate your PR success.
Quantitative techniques
👉 These are quantifiable, measurable ways to describe the success of your PR work
The primary benefit of using quantitative methods is the ability to set benchmarks for performance and compare yourself against your own historical results.
Here are a few notable ones:
- Media monitoring and analysis: with tools such as Prowly, you can quantify and track your PR coverage with metrics such as share of voice or with sentiment analysis of every mention of your brand or campaign.
- Impressions and reach: popular PR metrics that can be grossly misinterpreted. Besides looking at numbers alone, you should pay attention to the relevance of the target audience consuming your content, the sentiment and message accuracy, and the overall engagement. In other words, don't look at impressions and reach in isolation.
- Website traffic and conversions: when you set up your analytics correctly (Google Analytics is a great free choice), you can easily track referral traffic from PR campaigns. This lets you determine how many people come to your website and convert as a consequence of a PR campaign.
- Social media analytics: likes, reactions, shares, and retweets are great starting points. However, you should look deeper into more meaningful metrics, like amplification ratios and the ROI from influencer marketing campaigns.
Qualitative Techniques
👉 Albeit not ultra-precise, these techniques are crucial for understanding PR evaluation.
Qualitative techniques let you describe your PR work's impact and its effects on a brand's reputation and real-world results, such as conversions and return on investment.
- Sentiment analysis: how someone feels about you when mentioning your brand or campaign: positive, neutral, or negative. Tools such as Prowly use AI to help you quickly analyze thousands of comments and mentions and determine their sentiment.
- Message penetration: how well key messages get to your target audience. You can measure it by assessing how often (and well) messages are included in media coverage and how prominent and consistent they are. Test your audience's awareness and recall with open-ended feedback methods for added evaluation.
- Stakeholder feedback: how managers, CEOs, other employees, and customers perceive your PR campaign work. You can use qualitative research methods such as open-ended surveys, focus groups, roundtables, and interviews.
Best practices for PR evaluation
Wondering how to evaluate your PR efforts? Each business, client, and brand is unique, but here are some tips that everyone can apply:
Set SMART goals
Make your goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.
For example: "Within three months of our product launch, we will secure at least 20 media mentions in industry-relevant publications, with at least 50% of them accurately reflecting our key brand message, to increase brand awareness and credibility."
Adjust your metrics to the campaigns you're working on
For example, if your main aim is to improve sentiment around your brand, set your goal to increase positive sentiments by X%. On the other hand, if the goal is to get direct conversions, set the conversion rate for your website/landing page as your North Star metric.
Combine quantitative and qualitative data for a complete campaign analysis
Numbers alone don’t always reveal the full picture, and neither do opinions. By blending quantitative metrics with qualitative insights, you gain a more comprehensive understanding of your campaign’s impact.
Monitor progress in real-time
Modern tools such as Prowly let you monitor campaigns as they happen, catching brand mentions and analyzing their sentiment. This keeps you agile and allows you to adjust your approach on the go.
Key evaluation metrics for PR professionals
Depending on the end goal of your PR campaigns, you can choose different sets of PR metrics to track.
These are some good examples:
- Output metrics: media coverage, published press releases, social shares.
- Outcome metrics: changes in brand awareness, audience sentiment, and behavior.
- Business impact metrics: revenue growth, lead generation, and reputation management.
For example, if you aim to spread awareness about a new product, you will mainly focus on impressions. If the goal is to improve brand reputation, you'll look at the sentiment for each mention. If you want to generate leads, traffic to the website will be one of your main KPIs.
Here are some of the key metrics to pay attention to:
Share of Voice (SoV)
One of the staples of measuring PR success, SoV helps you determine how much of the market share you're grabbing in comparison to your major competitors so you can assess the overall success of your PR campaigns and determine how much of an influence you have in the industry.
💡 P.S. Learn more about Share of Voice from this article.
Media impressions and reach
How well you can reach your total potential audience (your impressions) and unique viewers (your reach). Instead of taking these metrics at face value, consider how well you are reaching the right audience instead of just showing up in front of a large group of people.
💡 Learn more about using reach and impressions in PR from this article.
Website metrics
Look at your referral traffic to find out which campaigns drive people to your website and from which sources. Review your bounce and conversion rates to determine if the people coming from PR campaigns convert better than those landing on your website organically.
Social media engagement rates
Measure your overall impact on social platforms by reviewing your engagement rates, sentiment analysis for campaigns and mentions, and influencer ROI. These should help you paint a clearer picture of how people engage with you on social media.
Earned media value
The monetary value assigned to unpaid media coverage, such as press mentions, influencer endorsements, and social media shares. It helps PR pros translate campaign results into measurable financial terms.
💡 If you want to dive deeper into the PESO model, read these articles:
➖ What Is Earned Media? Definition, Benefits, Campaign Examples
➖ Maximizing PR Strategy with Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
Backlinks and domain authority
Using tools such as Semrush, you can evaluate how many backlinks come in from your PR campaigns and how they contribute to your overall online presence. The better the domain authority of your incoming backlinks, the more successful your PR campaigns are.
With Prowly you can group domains into Tiers. You can create six. Tier one contains the most important domains for you, and the sixth the least crucial ones. Moreover, you can add each mention to Tiers.
Tools for PR Evaluation
If you want to evaluate your PR campaign performance, you have various tools at your disposal. Depending on your goals, you can choose one of the following:
- Media monitoring tools: platforms such as Prowly can track your campaign/brand coverage and allow you to generate custom reports on specific metrics quickly.
- AI in predictive analytics: AI and machine learning can use historical performance and current market situations to predict trends and make sentiment analysis even more precise.
- Data dashboards: many tools (e.g., Whatagraph, Databox) let you centralize metrics across platforms in a single dashboard for an easy overview by all stakeholders, internally or externally.
Emerging trends in PR evaluation
You don't have to be a PR research expert to determine where PR evaluation trends are headed.
These are the most important trends you should monitor in the upcoming months and years:
AI and machine learning
Artificial intelligence and machine learning models can help you enhance your data insights and give you predictive capabilities. For example, AI can tell you why a particular campaign worked well and, in light of market conditions, what you can do to replicate those results in the same time next year.
The focus on ESG metrics
Sustainability will be pivotal in the years to come, which is why it should be one of your primary objectives in public relations campaigns. ESG campaigns build trust and credibility, prevent greenwashing, and improve brand reputation.
Integrated marketing analytics
In the future, PR will fit into the larger landscape of marketing and sales goals. In other words, PR should not work in isolation. Instead, it should be considered as a spoke connecting to the main marketing hub and overall goals.
Authentic engagement
Instead of looking at superficial metrics such as impression or reach, consider looking at authentic interactions with your brand. For example, brand mentions along with overall sentiment for those mentions.
Wrapping up
PR evaluation is more than looking at a few metrics on a dashboard and calling it a day. To understand your PR performance, you and your team must consider a wide range of qualitative and quantitative metrics and consider how PR fits into your overall marketing, brand and business strategy.
Prowly can help with a suite of tools for measuring your PR efforts and understanding what is happening with your campaigns in real time.
Aside from trying out Prowly for free, you can read our blog for more insights on PR campaigns and how to measure and improve them.
