10 Yetis Insight Blog – How To Measure Success In An Unmeasurable Industry

The age old challenge of public relations is how to measure it. It’s a question that will come up for agencies meeting with clients right through to in-house PRs meeting with their MDs, Heads of Marketing or PR Directors. From the planning right through to the review stage, the question on everybody’s lips is: ‘How can we make this a success – and how will we know if it is one?’

The fact is that success can look different for every brand and, in fact, every campaign. The desired outcome should be the primary thing to consider right from the planning stage, so that the whole campaign is geared around reaching whatever that idea of success may be; from quantity through to quality, a highly targeted campaign through to a broader blast, reviews and product pieces through to business profiles and investment announcements.

Here’s some suggestions as to how to measure a PR campaign and the results it delivers, to figure out the point at which you can consider your work a success.

1.The readership of the title

This goes way beyond the circulation or audience, meaning you will need to do a little more research than just a click or two on a media database. It can be far more beneficial to consider the kind of demographic the publication is reaching; is it read by the market you want to reach? While good coverage is never a bad thing, it can be more or less relevant and deliver more or less results. A big, flamboyant piece on an irrelevant news site could make less of a mark than a small snippet on a relevant one, when it comes to generating traffic, enquiries or sales.

2.The circulation or unique visitors

The most obvious thing to monitor is the reach, so checking out the circulations of print publications and visitors for online ones is a straight forward starting point to figuring out how big your campaign has got. Make sure you use ABC verified circulations for the print publications, as these are legitimate and unable to be botched for advertising’s sake. When considering online coverage, look for the unique visitors of the site rather than the views or general visitors, as this is the difference between 10 different people seeing your article, or 1 person seeing it 10 times.

3.The domain authority

We mention this in all our client reports and it’s a good quality indicator to understand how well established a site is, in terms of how many visitors it has and the quality of the site itself. Nationals, like Yahoo!, Huffington Post and the Mail Online, will have a high DA score – over 70 out of 100, while smaller regionals and blogs are likely to have lesser DA score. This is a good indicator as to how much kudos a mention or link on the publication will lend to your site; if you have a link on a very low DA site, under 10 for instance, it can actually be damaging to your SEO as Google will interpret it as a risky, spammy site.

4.Quality of links

If you’re engaged in an SEO public relations drive and are looking to build links across different publications, which we often are, beware of celebrating too early when you see that sought-after link; for not all links are created equal. In fact, although followed links are the best kind for SEO, many publications will slyly weave in affiliate links instead, to take a commission from any sales that are made as a result of a click-through. This doesn’t provide the same value, and means that they are earning a commission from the brand.

5.The Final Results

Ok, you’ve got a massive front page piece on the Times (yay!) but have you got a spike in traffic and enquiries? Are you seeing a conversion, from the readers on the publication through to those frequenting your site or store? And how about the general awareness of your company – is there a higher level of interactions and engagements on social media, are journalists more receptive to your stories, have new prospects already heard of you or are they more likely to pro-actively seek you out? All of these things are strong indicators that the campaign has been a great success.

We are really proud of our work for clients and a key factor in securing the successes we’ve had is understanding what they wanted to achieve when we first set out. The better your comprehension at stage one, the better your campaign will adhere to it and the better your results will be. It really is worth putting the time in and doing the research to give yourself the best start.

All these factors should be considered together when working on any public relations activity, from designing plans right through to sending out spontaneous feature pitches and figuring out where the dream spots are.