3 tips to improve your PR measurement and reporting

As part of Vuelio’s Customer Voice series, we host regular focus groups to hear from our clients, track the latest sector trends and make sure we’re delivering what the industry needs.

Our most recent session focused on measurement and reporting, and the impact of PR campaigns on your organisation’s goals. A few clear challenges came out of the discussions along with practical advice to improve best practice.

1. Coverage quality vs coverage quantity
Reach is a common way of reporting on the potential number of people who could have seen your coverage. While reach figures look impressive to the board, on their own they provide little indication of the quality of coverage. For example, while the BBC might have a reach of 500 million, this doesn’t reflect how many of your target audience your coverage actually reached.

Providing context to the success of PR activity is a real challenge. Part of the problem is educating the board how a piece of coverage from an online influencer can be just as impactful as a piece in a national newspaper. The reach figure maybe vastly different but the reach of an influencer/blogger is much more targeted.

Pivoting from quantitative to qualitative reporting means moving away from numbers such as reach and circulation.

2. (Un)Integrated measurement
While PR teams are working closer with marketing and social media teams, when it comes to planning integrated campaigns they are all still reporting separately.

One option is to align PR KPIs with the marketing funnel to demonstrate that what they do helps fill up the top of the funnel and provides marketing with an engaged audience. Another option is to create KPIs together with all related departments to ensure you’re reporting on the same tactics in the same way.

3. Frameworks? Give us practical advice!
The approaches our group took to reporting were similar and everyone had a real appetite for practical best practice advice on measurement and reporting. With all the talk of how to tackle the challenge of evaluating PR in a meaningful way, there appears to be a knowledge gap between those leading the measurement conversation and those on the ground looking for credible methods to demonstrate how PR impacts on organisational goals.

This means if you’re involved in measurement in your organisation or in the wider industry, you need to do more to bring your colleagues, who are often at the coalface, into the conversation. It’s something we’re focusing on at Vuelio and we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can all improve this process. Get in touch and let us know.

Are you a Vuelio client? We’d love to hear from you – get involved in our Customer Voice series.