What PR Analytics Should Publicists Use?
The world of PR is extremely diverse, creative, rich in ideas, and full of stories. The main objective of PR efforts is to establish and maintain trust, direct consumers towards a certain brand, and create new relationships that drive revenue to clients in the long run. In order to convince your clients that your PR strategy is delivering results, it’s essential to work with a range of PR analytics that will help you demonstrate results rather than simply talk about them in meetings.
In this article, we’ll share with you a list of some of the best public relations analytics used by publicists.
List of PR analytics that publicists should use
Now that we’ve covered the main reasons for using PR analytics, it’s time to move on to the analytics themselves. What metrics should you use as part of your PR efforts? Which analytics will help you improve your PR strategy and demonstrate to clients your results?
We’ve created a list of PR analytic tools that will come in handy the next time you plan your PR strategy or have a meeting with a client who wants to see measurable results. You can find a short description of each metric below.
- Domain Authority
Domain Authority or DA shows how strong a website is, considering its backlink profile. DA is a common metric used to determine SEO performance but it is also a valuable analytics tool used by publicists. It offers a score out of 100 that shows how authoritative a website is and how likely it is to rank on Google. The closer to 100 the score is, the better. PR efforts can certainly help increase Domain Authority for a client’s site thanks to a backlink, but can also be used to establish if a media outlet is authoritative enough to work with, and worth pitching.
- Social Shares
Social shares reveal the total amount of times a certain article has been shared on a specific social media platform. This metric can be useful when showing clients the results of a PR campaign, and how viral it was. You can identify which social media channels are working best for your client, how people engage with the brand in social media, and more.
- Mentions
The majority of PR experts nowadays use media monitoring tools to track chosen keywords and topics. Although Google Alerts can come in handy, it will only show information from Google and it’s not always 100% reliable for the keywords you’re trying to track. The mentions metric will help you discover everything that’s being said about a brand or a company online. You can use industry keywords, common misspellings, nicknames, top executives, and brand names for measuring mentions.
- Press Lifetime Views
Press Lifetime Views show the estimated amount of total visitors to a given press piece for the life of an article. This metric provides a clear picture of an article or story’s lifetime and can be used to predict results in the long-term.
- Ad Value Equivalency
Ad Value Equivalency or AVE is a popular metric used by PR professionals and publicists to calculate a client’s benefit from the media coverage of a specific PR campaign. In short, AVE calculates the cost of buying a media space that is taken up by an article if the article was an advertisement. The metric is useful for establishing how much value you deliver from a story you have secured.
- Impressions
Impressions uncover the number of times an ad or piece of content has been displayed to a user on a website. However, it’s important to note that this doesn’t always guarantee that the user has engaged with the content or even read it. Impressions are not the same as awareness. Just because someone was exposed to an ad or content does not mean they clicked on the article and showed interest in it.
- Share of Voice
You can see Share of Voice referred to as SOV. It’s a PR metric that provides a comparison between a brand’s mentions in the media and competitors’ mentions in the media. It is used as a way to measure the authority of a brand by establishing the percentage of industry media that talks about your client’s brand. Share of Voice is a great way to measure your PR team’s performance and compare that against competitors.
- Reach
No matter how good your PR campaign is, it is worthless unless it reaches enough people and the correct target audience. Media reach allows you to examine the potential impact that your PR story or campaign has by showing the total number of people who see your content. It is an analytics metric that reveals how many unique users see a piece of content and will help you quantify the amount of people who actually saw an article.
- Brand Sentiment
Brand sentiment or brand health helps publicists with social listening or media monitoring by revealing the attitude users and potential buyers have towards a certain brand. It is established by taking into consideration and analyzing brand mentions, comments, and reviews online by users. It provides PR experts with feedback on whether attitudes are positive, negative, or neutral.
- Circulation
A popular, traditional PR metric used by publicists is circulation, which reveals how many copies of a publication have been distributed. Circulation is the total number of copies distributed or sold by a publication of a specific issue, over a specific period of time. It’s important to note that the number of readers is not the same as the circulation number. Distributing the publication does not guarantee that it will be read due to nonreaders or pass-along readership, which are not included in circulation.
- Readership
The readership metric estimates how many readers a publication has. It calculates the average number of people who read an individual copy of the publication. The assumption is that the majority of publications have more than one reader per copy. Let’s say that in a household there are at least two people who will read the same publication. There is also a relationship between readership and circulation that is referred to as readers-per-copy that divides readership by circulation and is also considered a valuable metric in PR.
- SEO Impact
There is also a diversity of SEO metrics that are frequently used by PR experts that show how PR campaigns and efforts have influenced the SEO performance of a brand’s website. Apart from domain authority, which is also considered an SEO metric used in PR, there are a few more worth exploring:
- Estimated page views You can analyze whether your PR efforts have helped improve brand awareness by looking at the page views of your content. Although page views will not show how many users have become customers, they will tell you whether you’re successfully getting your brand noticed.
- Branded traffic search This metric shows how many people search for your brand name online. Noticing that the branded traffic search is increasing is a sure sign that the PR team is efficiently creating public awareness and inspiring more users to search for your brand specifically.
- Backlink authority Analyzing your website’s backlink authority will help reveal whether your PR strategy is generating backlinks from high-authority, reputable locations or is instead cultivating backlinks from locations that are rather undesirable and will not lead to much credit given by Google.
- Referral traffic Having an understanding of your referral traffic allows you to improve your campaigns and create personalized content. Referral traffic is any traffic received from an outside source like a blog post, a case study, social media, or other channels.
Unlock the potential of your PR team with the right analytics
Equipping yourself and your PR team with the appropriate analytics will help you dramatically improve your PR strategies, communicate easily with clients on the results that you’ve achieved, and allocate budgets more effectively. We’re here to support you with easy to understand, detailed analytics and seamless report on your PR efforts, boosting your productivity, client trust, retention rate, and revenue.