media update’s Taylor Goodman takes a look at five of the most telling metrics when it comes to measuring the success of your PR campaign. 

According to Hubspot, 82% of marketers do not know how to evaluate the ROI they receive on PR — and if you fall in with that percentage, you may also be wondering why you should monitor these campaigns in the first place. 

Let’s start with the most obvious point –– publicity campaigns are expensive! This means that to know whether you’re getting your money’s worth, you need to measure how successful your campaign is in meeting targets and reaching consumers. 

Secondly, measuring the effectiveness of your campaign helps to identify where you went wrong and what to improve in the future. It is also important to note that you need to have comprehensive knowledge of these metrics to craft a successful campaign. 

With this in mind, let’s look at five metrics for measuring the success of a PR campaign: 

1. Sales statistics 

It is true, PR does not have a direct effect on sales but a solid publicity campaign can help to generate quality leads.

When measuring sales, there are many demographics that one should consider to gain a wholesome understanding of the impact a PR campaign has on sales. These factors are:  

Location

Observing sales metrics according to the location can help you to identify the areas where your brand is performing well, as well as areas where sales may be dismal. This insight can help you note which areas you are not selling in — allowing you to take a second look at your PR strategy and adapt it according to that location.

Additionally, as you can see where your brand is performing well, you may decide to ramp up the PR and marketing efforts in those areas to really maximise the amount of sales. 

Age range

Identifying which age range your customers fall into can help your brand to know which channels are best for reaching this consumer base. This ensures that your brand is connected to your audience. 

For example, if your customers are mainly millennials or Gen Z, you would want to optimise your social media presence. 

The time frame of sales

When running a publicity campaign and trying to make sense of how this has translated into sales, the time frame is crucial to monitor. This is because you gain direct insight into how many sales your campaign has generated by monitoring the time frame when this campaign was running. 

If sales increase during the period when your campaign is running, it likely helps to boost sales; if not, it may be time to go back to the drawing board. 

Sales channels

Noting which sales channels your consumer base favours is another key factor to monitor when it comes to sales. This is because it allows your brand to see which channels your audience prefers to shop through, therefore allowing you to maximise your efforts where it matters. 

An example of this is if the majority of your clients prefer to shop via your online store instead of brick-and-mortar. In this case, you may want to put extra work into making your e-commerce platforms as efficient as possible. 

2. Social media reach and engagement

In the digital age, brands can't get away with not monitoring their performance on social media, as this is likely that their consumers are very active on these platforms. As social media’s influence continues to grow, it is pertinent that brands put their best foot forward online. 

When monitoring social media, the most important metrics to observe are reach and engagement.

According to PRmention, a brand’s social media reach is determined by how many followers your brand has and how many consumers have seen your social posts. This means that you can measure reach according to your social media account as a whole or on a post-by-post basis, depending on what your goal is. 

To get a basic idea of your brand’s reach, you will want to monitor how many followers or subscribers your brand has and if that number fluctuates. From there, if you run a digital PR campaign, you will want to monitor the organic reach of this specific post to gauge whether it is meeting targets or not. 

Popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have built-in tools that give you insight into your post’s organic reach, making it simple to analyse how many people your campaign has reached. 

Monitoring reach can be beneficial to your brand as it helps you to keep track of follower growth and helps to give you a rough understanding of how your campaign will perform. 

Social media engagement expands on reach. This metric tells us, of those who have seen your posts, how many people are engaging with it.

Engagement includes: 
  • the number of likes, retweets or shares your post has.
  • any direct mentions of your brand.
  • the number of link clicks your post has.
Taking note of the above will give you an understanding of how your campaigns resonate with your audience; the more they engage, the better. To take things one step further, you could easily obtain the help of a social media monitoring service, like amaSocial

3. Brand mentions

When running a PR campaign, you must monitor brand mentions. This will give you insight into how many times your business or any branded hashtags have been mentioned online. 

The easiest way to monitor brand mentions is via a media monitoring service like Newsclip, where you can utilise their brand tracking feature. This feature allows you to stay on top of any media coverage your brand is receiving in ads, traditional media and online

According to Newsclip, brand tracking comprises of
  • media monitoring
  • social media monitoring
  • social listening
  • advert monitoring 
  • media coverage reporting

Keeping track of brand mentions can benefit you when running campaigns as it gives you insight into the conversations that your audience is having about your brand. This allows you to take note of any positive feedback or criticisms that consumers may have. This knowledge can help you to tailor your campaigns accordingly. 

4. Sentiment

To expand on brand mentions, monitoring sentiment can give brands major insight into how consumers perceive your company. 

Focal Points offers a sentiment analysis service which utilises Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse mentions and classify various words as either negative, neutral or positive. In the context of a campaign, the brand can select a particular text and monitor the sentiment surrounding it. 

Additionally, Newsclip offers a campaign keyword tracking feature. This feature allows you to track keywords relating to a specific project. This will give you deeper insight into the sentiment surrounding your campaign.

Why, you might ask? Taking note of sentiment can benefit your PR campaigns as you will gain insight into whether the consumer feels positive, negatively or neutral about your campaign. This insight can help you pick up on what your audience is receptive to, which can help you craft better campaigns in the future. 

It is important to note that positive sentiment indicates that your campaign was well received and negative sentiment means it was negatively received — meaning you should alter your PR strategy accordingly going forward. Neural sentiment could entail that your campaigns were a miss with your audience, indicating that you should try a different approach in future campaigns.

5. Online traffic

Last, but certainly not least, is online traffic. For many, this could be the determining factor of a PR campaigns success, as the prominent goal of any campaign is to boost brand awareness. 

Online traffic is an important metric to measure as it gives you insight into whether your campaign is reaching consumers and generating qualified leads. Brand24 defines qualified leads as “unique visitors who looked you up in search engines, and, from there, found your website.” 

In the context of running a campaign, generating qualified leads would mean that your campaign was successful in making consumers aware of your brand, so much so that they took it upon themselves to seek you out. 

You can monitor your brand’s online traffic via Google Analytics. This tool can help you identify which social platform is the source of the traffic, your website’s total number of visitors and your web page’s bounce rate. 

These insights are a gold mine for understanding the success of your campaign, as they show which platforms are successfully driving users to your webpage and whether your content is well received. 

Instead of pouring all of that hard work and money into crafting an aimless campaign, use these metrics to effectively target your audience and create campaigns that stick!

Which metric do you think is most telling of a successful campaign? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below.

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So now that you know which metrics to measure, be sure to check out Four things that make up an excellent PR campaign.
*Image courtesy of Vecteezy