Press coverage is the bread and butter of any PR agency, and many agencies evaluate the success of editorial coverage using monthly ‘Reach’ figures. Some will also attribute media coverage to an AVE (the price you might have paid had you bought the editorial coverage as advertising), 15 years after the PR industry publicly shamed AVEs and attempted to remove it as a professionally acceptable metric.

If you would like to learn more about AVEs, or clear-up any nagging thoughts about your agency using it as a metric, then read this blog: The Dark Side of PR Evaluation. My recommendation is don’t work with agencies who use it, and always refuse an FD / MD who asks you to use them.

Is Reach a valuable metric?   

Awareness is a widely acknowledged PR objective, and the metric used to quantify awareness is Reach. This is usually achieved by taking the average monthly readership based on print circulation or the traffic of unique monthly users the website receives. Reach only reports the potential amount of people who might have seen the coverage, so it is not a wholly satisfactory evaluation of PR delivery.  And, I would argue if awareness is an important objective, then advertising is a more guaranteed route to success.

It's easy to fall into a trap of measuring potential reach, as it’s a vanity metric. If you get coverage in the Independent, agencies can attribute the reach as 45 million, because that’s the number of people who access the Independent on a monthly basis. Specific page views is a more valid metric, but this is tough to glean from a national media.  

It’s a complex challenge that no-one in the PR or reporting industry has managed to crack. Agencies overlay Reach figures by allocating media titles into priority tiers, and key message penetration is important, as is the tone of a piece. Putting in these additional measures while still reporting potential Reach still doesn’t measure impact, or satisfactorily justify to an FD an improved awareness, or return on PR investment. 

Where the value lies in PR.

PR is the business of provoking a reaction. I call it, making someone’s face move, and while awareness can be an expensive metric to prove, engagement isn’t.

It’s highly unlikely that provoking a thought or feeling doesn’t elicit a reaction - an engagement. The reaction should be a positive step made towards an improved opinion of a business. An improved opinion that will lead to a sale, or an endorsement. This is true PR impact, this is what you should be measuring, and it is possible to measure it.

While print coverage can really only ever be evaluated for reach and awareness (unless you embed a QR code on the page, but that's for a different blog), in today’s fast paced world of digital media penetrating every aspect of life, a click, a dwell, a share, a comment are all valid ways to demonstrate that a piece of PR has moved someone’s face.

At Vista we report the actions taken as a result of online coverage to prove our success and we think these metrics absolutely must be part of PR evaluation.

Media coverage that contains product reviews with positive outcomes, for example inclusion in ‘best of’ lists are Google gold, great for SEO, great avenues to purchase. Quality media coverage that contains thought leadership from a brand in a relevant position is also Google gold, because that will help to rank the business as an expert. However, to demonstrate an impact on the humans who have read the piece, push to include a UTM or Bitly link to monitor click throughs, check for likes, shares, page views and dwell time. Was the article shared on social media and if so, what was the engagement around it? Without knowing if inclusion in an article provoked a reaction, all you are reporting is if Google was stimulated. And Google is getting wise to cheap SEO tricks. 

We recently placed an exclusive with Mail Online that also ran in print. The editorial team took their time to load the story. By 3pm the journalist rang me to ask me to ‘keep the faith’ and not pitch it out to anyone else. He said Mail online has a 250m global reach. At 6pm they posted. I’m quite confident that 250m people globally have not read the article and we have not reported this number to our client. However, I am confident that 79 people shared the article and 137 people commented on it and nearly every comment related to the core subject matter and the product our client makes. We adjusted the reach figure to 7m and reported the engagement.

Today I have been reviewing a report from paid media activity. The same publication ran a ‘solus’ newsletter of content specifically written for the client, an MPU and a promo banner at the top of another newsletter with no written content for the client. Sent to the same recipients on different dates, the promo banner achieved 11 clicks, the solus, 96. With a similar number of impressions to the number of people on the email database, the MPUs achieved 23 clicks. The bespoke email achieved four times more clicks than the ads. Put another way, the solus email drove 96 people through the shop door – that is a quantifiable number. Analysing a trade publication email banner reaching 77,000 recipients, it drove 860 customers to the client site. This is a solid return on the investment.

Digging into the engagement patterns like this informs our paid strategy and improves performance, provides benchmarks and targets. Looking at reach figures in silo, we’re shooting in the dark.