Measuring PR Beyond Media Mentions: ROI, Domain Authority, and Brand Equity

Public Relations has predominantly been measured through a rise in circulation, increasing column inches, and front-page coverage occasionally. The yardstick to measure the successful of a PR campaign usually involved some form of measurement by volumes, number of articles, key touchpoints in media houses, extravagant headlines and share of voice.

Sounds familiar? It is.

These are all various forms of disguise for the erstwhile AVE. I kid you not. It is still around.

However, in the current digitally dominated world, the old metrics are being challenged and a push towards making them obsolete in underway as they do not reflect audience behaviour. Visibility alone doesn’t translate to generating value. For brands to thrive in the current times, they need influence, trustworthiness, and a sustained impact on the community.

The new-age PR leaders are steering away from the age-old metrics to assess campaign performance through significant markers like Return on Investment (ROI), Domain Authority (DA), and their increased contribution to brand equity. The shift in focus of the indicators presents how PR exceeds being a mere tool for increasing awareness and contributes strongly to the business’s growth.

Shift from Impressions to Influence

The number of impressions that media pieces garner has topped the analytics dashboards predominantly. As easy as the metric is to present, they seldom spoke about the impact of the story on the audience. A largely circulated newspaper carrying a mention about a brand didn’t translate to all the subscribers of the newspaper engaging with that particular news.

The new metric is influence.

Influence relies on the quality of coverage, the credibility of the platform carrying it, and how the message leaves a prolonged impact on the intended audience. Placing a brand’s spokesperson interview in a niche trade journal that is actively read by key decision-makers of the industry is more valuable than a mass daily.

Domain Authority (DA), a metric underscoring a website’s strength and integrity on SERPs, showcases how the brand is well-received. Coverage in high-DA media houses builds brand reputation, increases digital reach organically.

Focus on Engagement Over Exposure

Exposure is the key to queries about the number of people who viewed the content, whereas engagement aims to dive deeper into understanding how many reached out communicate back with the brand to get specific questions answered. The latter remains relevant in contemporary times. A social media post which sees immense reshares, comments, and invokes mindful conversations is an engagement-rich media piece than one that just sees a high number of likes. Engagement can be further measured through website traffic attained through a particular media channel, and time spent on the landing pages. These insights provide a nuanced view of audience behaviour and how the PR campaign/ activity impacted the customer journey.

Engagement metrics of such kind help define PR as an equally important vertical along with marketing and sales to integrally achieve business goals. When the leadership can decode how a feature interview helped increase traffic on the website, PR gets its seat at the decision-making table.

It is not an easy feat but when achieved cements that seat at the table.

Blend Storytelling to Brand Strategy

Centrally, PR is all about storytelling. Storytelling without a strategy of defining a brand goal is however merely noise. To be effective, stories should subtly speak about the business priorities, brand values, and meet customer needs.

Bridging storytelling and strategy helps improve ROI measurement. If the goal is to position a brand as a first-of-its-kind innovator, the PR activity’s success is measured if the media coverage focuses on keywords that identify it with the sentiment. You can have a list that you know are part of the approved key word list but be flexible here. There could be words that infer the above and they should also count.

The Bigger Picture – From Mentions to Sense

PR in the current time focuses on things deeper than merely being omnipresent superficially. Increasing sustained brand recall through meaningful engagement with the community will always stump superficial visibility.

The new-age metrics like ROI, DA, and brand equity cement the fact that communications are evaluated by their nuance and mere impressions. The true value of PR lies in the ripple effect of how a story alters perceptions, ignites engagement, and catalyzes business growth.

The smart ones are already there.  

– Neha Bahri,

Founder – BConnect PR & PRPOI Panelist