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Measure PR
The key to know what works and what doesn't in your public relations efforts
Keren Speck
January 07, 2025
What's in store for this edition:
Different ways to measure your public relations
8 Cost-Effective Ways to Measure PR Efforts
Just because you don’t have a big budget for fancy measurements, does not mean you should give up trying to measure the impact your public relations efforts resulted in. When you start tracking and measuring your efforts you can make informed decisions on how to pivot or what to change since you’ll know what worked and what didn’t.
Lets start to understand some metrics that are affordable and easy to follow. Remember to keep track of your discoveries.
Media Coverage and Mentions
Track Press Clippings and Mentions: Try using free tools like Google Alerts to monitor when your brand or campaign is mentioned online. Set up alerts for your company name, campaign hashtags, or keywords.
Social Media Mentions: Use the built-in analytics on platforms to track mentions, hashtags, and engagement related to your campaign. These may need to be enabled as business or professional tools.
Most social media platforms offer some helpful analytics, although you may need to enable them as a business or professional feature.
Engagement: Monitor likes, shares, comments, and retweets on your posts. These metrics indicate how well your message sits with the audience.
Follower Growth: Track changes in your social media followers before, during and after a campaign.
Monitoring Tools: Platforms like Hootsuite (free trial) or Mentionlytics (free version) offer basic tracking of social media activity and brand mentions.
Website Traffic
Use Google Analytics, a free tool, to track spikes in website traffic during your PR campaign.
Look at:
🔎 Referral sources to see if visitors came from media coverage, social media, or other source.
🔎 Pages visited and time spent on the site to gauge interest.
Surveys and Feedback
Conduct simple surveys using free tools like Google Forms (free) or SurveyMonkey (basic plan) to measure audience awareness or sentiment before and after your campaign.
Ask questions about how people heard about your brand or their perception of it.
Sentiment Analysis
Perform a manual sentiment analysis by reviewing comments on social media posts or articles about your brand. Note whether the tone is positive, neutral, or negative.
Free tools like Social Searcher can also help analyze sentiment for mentions online.
Compare the number of mentions your brand receives against competitors by searching for relevant keywords in news outlets or social media platforms.
Website Conversions
Track specific actions tied to PR efforts, such as newsletter sign-ups, downloads, or purchases, using Google Analytics' conversion tracking feature.
Compare Pre- and Post-Campaign Data
Establish a baseline before launching a campaign (e.g., current website traffic, follower count).
Compare these metrics after the campaign ends to measure growth or impact.
With all these measurements available to you, you’re just as fancy as a big PR firm!
“What gets measured, gets improved.”
Do this now: Make a record of you base line traffic
Current web traffic _____
Current social followers on each platform _____ _____ _____ _____
Newsletter subscriber count _____
Term to Learn
Qualitative methods focus on non-numerical insights, exploring the deeper meanings behind audience behavior, perceptions, and attitudes. These methods answer "Why?" or "How?" questions and are ideal for understanding the context or motivations behind quantitative results.
They include: focus groups, interviews, content analysis, sentiment analysis, and case studies. These methods tend to be expensive and overkill for many efforts.
FAQ
Q: Is PR is more expensive than advertising?
A: Not necessarily. PR doesn't have to be as expensive, and can be just effective as advertising. Plenty of incredible and talented PR agencies and freelancers are out there and offer good value without breaking your budget, or you can do it yourself, like this newsletter teaches you to do.
Get PR techniques from recent news.
Newsworthy
Polar Vortex 🌪️❄️
A massive storm will be hitting the central US with snow, ice, severe cold and possible tornadoes.
What can you do to show good community relations?
Essential strategy:
Reach out to clients, vendors or others in the affected area and check in with them. See if there is anything practical that you can do.
Do you have a products that can be donated? Gloves, blankets, jackets, food or other essentials may have increased demand.
Provide a warming center or shelter for those in need.
Offer care packages and show your appreciation for Emergency Responders.
Whatever you do, be safe and consider the safety of others.
✍️ Key PR Takeaway: Showing kindness will make an imprint on the hearts of those who were beneficiaries of your concern.
Learn from others.
100% Cool : 0% Cringe
Richard Paredes, a student at Binghamton University, made his company, Interlix Staffing, quite famous by getting it featured in Forbes magazine.
His company helps people from other countries find jobs with small businesses in the U.S. This Forbes article is good for Richard because now more people know about his company, which could mean more jobs for workers and more customers for him.
It's also great for his school because it shows that their students can start cool businesses, making the school look even better to other kids who might want to go there.
✍️ Key PR Takeaway: Telling your story that attracts press interviews helps small businesses in establishing credibility and growing a professional network.
Useful PR Resources.
🧰 TOOLKIT
Coverage Book
This is a PR reporting tool with automated metrics so you can quickly create a coverage report for a PR campaign. You can try it for free for 30 days, and pause or cancel it when your campaign is complete.
Here’s how it works:
1. Paste links to website articles, social media posts, YouTube etc. Or upload print clippings, video or audio files.
2. Choose how to present your coverage and what metrics to feature.
3. Customize and share your book: Online, as a PDF or CSV.
Attention Seeker of the Week
Brutus, the 4 year old stray, waiting to be adopted, gets to be on TV. All of his drooling and attention seeking earned him lots of belly rubs at the local station. Hopefully it will get him a new forever home.
Can we feature your furry attention seeker?
Stay warm and safe this week with a monster blizzard and cold weather.
Until next week, keep your shades on and stay cool.
Your fellow Seeker,
Keren
🕶️
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