How can we measure PR effectiveness?
At Context we are asked this question nearly every day.
I recently pitched to a new business prospect where nearly everyone on the board wanted to implement a PR campaign but the sales director was just not convinced. In the end they didn’t go through with it.
The key discussion we had was about measuring effectiveness so here are a few thoughts:
Equivalent Advertising Value
This basially measures PR coverage in column inches and compares it to the cost of advertising in the same publication. A PR purist will then claim that editorial is between three and ten times more effective than advertising and a small cutting in a national daily newspaper ends up being worth £10,000. Is this true - it can be if the phone rings and gets the client business but in reality just measuring ad value is a very poor way of monitoring.
More Links to a Company Web Site
I recently read an article that said if you were buying links to your web site then they would cost £50 a time - If that were the case the press release that I sent out for a client which took us a couple of hours to write but got over 200 web links from quality news outlets would of cost them over £10,000 - Again a very unrealistic figure but the number of links in can be important.
More Web Traffic
Like adding links traffic is often used as a measure but unless you are able to monitor every online article, every search and every direct url entry a practical impossibility.
Sales Lead Tracking
Having worked in PR for a few years (more than ten less than twenty) this can be very difficult to monitor as when the phone rings customers can generally never remember where they heard about the client from. We even worked for an online client that had TV advert down as a lead source even though they had never advertisied and about 30% of site visitors clicked on this as where they heard about us from.
All in all measuring PR effectiveness is very difficult - in reality how effective PR is comes down to the following:
- Number of cuttings
- Quality of the titles cuttings appear in
- Number of online links
- Quality of the story
- Does the phone ring
If you’re looking to the answer to this fundamental question I’m sorry you have read to the end on not received one. It was probably like reading the whole of Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and not finding out what the answer to the ultimate question was but there we go.
This may sound stupid but effectiveness of PR can only really be measured over time and as part of the overall marketing communications mix.