The measure of PR success
Andy Ball, managing director for Balls2 Marketing, talks about how to measure the success of a PR campaign.
A question we get asked regularly is how can you measure the level of success from a PR campaign? With many forms of online advertising and social media, it’s easy to count visits to websites or link clicks, but especially with printed PR it’s often more difficult to measure.
The Chartered Institute of Public Relations offers best practice for measuring successes for both online and offline. Setting business goals or specific aims for the campaign is important. This means we have a benchmark to measure against. Often these are sales goals but sometimes they are based around reputation or perception. These are often the most exciting campaigns as we see the changes right from the start.
For 2019, it’s been smart technology. Look at the difference between the contents of this magazine in December 2018 and today. You’ll see a big increase in the number of times smart technology is mentioned. PR pushes the integration of this faster than any other type of marketing. We know that results happen within minutes of reading. Phone calls from existing customers are the most likely as they want to part of the opportunity from the get-go.
The number of press releases, tweets or emails is a measure of output, and while this is important, it’s not a measure of success. Nor do we measure the success of PR in AVEs (advertising value equivalent). This is a very crude method of calculating the equivalent cost of an advert for the space taken up by the PR piece in a magazine or newspaper. The CIPR has distanced itself from this way of measurement and promotes using meaningful measurements that relate to the campaign.
Google Analytics and social media statistics are great to show trends, but they don’t give the insight that qualitative metrics do. While increases in sales figures are the real barometer of commercial success, we also include measuring changes to the content of a magazine or the language that’s used, as it shows the true power of PR.
