5 key metrics to assess your earned media success
Some of these gauges, such as formulating article quality scores, require a bit of hard work, but at least you’ll garner viable data so your subsequent work will show significant ROI.
PR pros struggle to measure results and quantify their contribution to business objectives.
Measurement experts dismiss advertising value equivalency (AVE), which compares the value of earned media to advertising of similar size and placement, as an invalid metric. They also call earned media value—often calculated by multiplying the reach of earned or social media content by a multiplier based on impressions—a meaningless metric.
The days of evaluating public relations campaigns by counting clips and measuring column inches are long gone. PR now has new tools at its disposal that help analyze its earned media accomplishments with these metrics.
Website referrals. Website analytics offer the most basic PR measurement tool. Information on referral traffic under the Google Analytics acquisition tab can reveal website traffic from media placements—sometimes. Some online publications might not include a link to your site when mentioning your organization. Some readers might head directly to your website through a search engine.
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