The days of PR agencies and in-house teams relying on “brand awareness” as a catch-all term for the results produced by a media relations program are long gone. Today’s digital-focused world offers greater insight into consumer behavior than ever before, and thus, many options for marketing teams to more closely evaluate the efficacy of their public relations programs.
While there are still inherent challenges across all fields of digital marketing when it comes to truly understanding the path of purchase and how each touchpoint plays a role in a consumer purchase, good PR practitioners are looking at the various ways in which media placements are impacting that path and tracking them with more precise metrics as opposed to vague estimates. Interestingly, many of the most impactful ways to measure a PR program are through tools typically used for other digital marketing efforts, so it’s important that PR professionals aren’t limiting themselves to the tools that are typically labeled specifically for “PR measurement.
While every brand must establish their own unique mixture of marketing metrics and KPIs to track against them, some of the modern metrics that Max Borges Agency has been tracking include:
Domain Authority and backlink presence: A domain’s authority is an important metric to consider when measuring the success of a PR program. Domain authority (DA) is a score created by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. It is based on factors such as the number and quality of backlinks, internal linking, and other SEO signals. A high DA score indicates that a website is more likely to rank well for competitive keywords, while a low DA score indicates that a website may have difficulty ranking for any keywords at all. Measuring domain authority and page authority in tandem with whether or not a backlink was included in the article is a great way to measure how a PR program is impacting a brand’s website SEO over time. We recommend regularly tracking these metrics in month to month reporting, then cross-referencing them long term with a brand’s website organic search performance and search engine rankings
Search position ranking of earned media placements: Not to be confused with the SEO impact of media coverage on a brand’s website, the metric we’re referring to here is actually how often a media placement appears in Google keyword searches and how much traffic it receives as a result on a monthly basis. In the screenshot below, we use the site SEMRush to look at the organic traffic for a specific URL of a client placement. This media placement ranks for 855 keywords and is estimated to receive 7.2K visits monthly from visitors searching for things like “best speakers” or “best wireless speakers” on search engines. Furthermore, you can see that the equivalent monthly Google ad budget for earning a paid position for these keywords would be $5K per month (which gives a much more modern take on advertising equivalency values).
Web store referrals and affiliate analytics platforms: While PR agencies have been tracking media placement referrals and sales from brand websites that offer a retail point of purchase for years, the growing trend that blurs the line between affiliate and editorial means that its more important than ever to also look to affiliate platforms to measure the sales performance of affiliate publishers. Integrating analytics from platforms such as ShareaSale and Amazon are essential for effectively measuring a PR program end-to-end. It’s also essential to continue monitoring these platforms for evolving features that offer greater depth into the customer journey across these platforms from publishers.
