Chapter 2
PR and Measurement

The History of Measurement in Public Relations and Communications

The single biggest challenge that PR pros have been facing since the very birth of the industry has been measurement.

Just google PR measurement and you'll see tons of articles explaining how advertising value equivalents (AVEs) don't work, how we need a new set of tools to measure PR results, how PR hasn't adjusted to the new era of digital and metrics, and so on.

The problems associated with measuring the effectiveness of PR have their roots in a lot of insecurities over the last century within the PR industry itself and a number of failed attempts to find a measurement framework that can be universally accepted and approved not just by PR professionals themselves but also by clients, stakeholders, shareholders, and other interest groups.

If you do a little bit of research into the topic of measurement for communications you'll no doubt find Professor Tom Watson of Bournemouth University in England, who has been researching public relations measurement and evaluation for the past 20 years. He says: “I'd like to say that it's a story of continuous improvement in public relations practice and its measurement and evaluation, but that's not the case. I find that the emphasis on consumer and marketing-led PR since the 1950s has fostered poor practices, although major corporations have moved ahead” (Watson, 2011).

This inability to find one way to measure PR and prove its worth to the bottom line is what has driven the industry's negative perception and reputation. A lot of people have a firm belief that PR cannot be measured and so choose not to invest in it, which, in turn, causes the industry to suffer.

So how did PR get there?

Mainly by relying on metrics and methods that are quantifiable but absolutely irrelevant as they don't relate back to business goals and outcomes but rather to tactical outputs, particularly focused on the results of publicity or typical media relations, as we said earlier.

Let's take a look at some of those irrelevant metrics:

  1. img Media impressions: This is the number of visitors a certain publication has. No matter how spectacular your article is, it's not going be read by absolutely every one of those visitors nor could you be certain that those people really are your ideal target audience. This is why impressions as a metric tell you nothing about whether you've reached the right people and the right number of people you need to hit your business goals.
  2. img Number of placements or clippings: This is about calculating in how many media outlets you appeared. As with impressions, counting how many mentions your company has received tells you nothing about whether those mentions have brought you customers.

Now you see, these two were used back in the 1930s and 1940s by the U.S. government and, ironically, are still used today, as Professor Watson explains in his research paper, “The Evolution of Evaluation—the Accelerating March Towards the Measurement of Public Relations Effectiveness” (Watson, 2011a, 5–6).

AVEs? Still?

But there's another, even more dangerous metric: advertising value equivalents (AVEs). This method arose with the increasing focus of management on the bottom line as an attempt to find a way to show the dollar value of PR activities.

AVEs involve calculating column inches of published articles or the earned seconds of airtime on TV and radio and multiplying the total of those by the advertising rate of the media where the coverage appeared.

AVEs are still being used today although they are flawed and often misleading. Here are some of the reasons they are not well suited for use today:

  1. img The publicity could be negative so you can't compare it with advertising, which is always positive because you pay big money for it and therefore control the message.
  2. img The articles could mention competitors or speak more positively about other companies than yours, unlike advertising, which is just about your brand because you pay for it.
  3. img The editorials could appear in totally irrelevant media channels where no one from your target audience is. You probably wouldn't do that with advertising as it's expensive and you'd be very careful where you put your money.

But the most significant reason for the ineffectiveness of AVEs is that they measure cost—not value—by calculating the equivalent media space and time for advertising thus making the method flawed. In his PR Metrics Report, Jim Macnamara from the University of Technology Sydney exclaims, “No one in marketing or management would measure the value of advertising simply in terms of its cost—it must be a good campaign because it cost $7 million!” (Macnamara 2015, 34).

What's more, some PR professionals not only compare advertising rates but go beyond that to add multipliers of the respective ad value that are three, four, or five times higher or even more. They do this because editorial and media content is supposed to be more credible and valuable than self-promotional advertising.

But let's not forget that PR today is not just publicity or media relations, so AVEs can't help in the world of digital and social media communications. Would you really compare the advertising rate for a tweet?

The Barcelona Principles

Luckily, the Barcelona Principles were developed in 2010 urging PR pros to move away from advertising value equivalents and agree upon a new, minimum standard of measurement that actually shows the value of PR for an organization.

The Barcelona Principles comprise seven guidelines to measurement that focus on outcomes and business results rather than media results and outputs.1

The first version of the Barcelona Principles was introduced in 2010 as follows:

  1. Importance of Goal Setting and Measurement
  2. Measuring the Effect on Outcomes Is Preferred to Measuring Outputs
  3. The Effect on Business Results Can and Should Be Measured Where Possible
  4. Media Measurement Requires Quantity and Quality
  5. AVEs Are Not the Value of Public Relations
  6. Social Media Can and Should Be Measured
  7. Transparency and Replicability Are Paramount to Sound Measurement

In 2015, a revised and updated version was published to serve as a foundation to any communications program or function, not just for PR. Here's how the guidelines were updated:2

  1. Goal Setting and Measurement Are Fundamental to Communication and Public Relations
  2. Measuring Communication Outcomes Is Recommended Versus Only Measuring Outputs
  3. The Effect on Organizational Performance Can and Should Be Measured Where Possible
  4. Measurement and Evaluation Require Both Qualitative and Quantitative Methods
  5. AVEs Are Not the Value of Communications
  6. Social Media Can and Should Be Measured Consistently with Other Media Channels
  7. Measurement and Evaluation Should Be Transparent, Consistent, and Valid

As much as I like this new focus, the Barcelona Principles are still not a framework, they simply provide guidance, which is why I don't believe they've been widely adopted. They make sense, yes, but acting on them is left up to individuals. That's not how most people change their behavior, however. Most need something that spells out much more clearly how they will actually measure the results of PR efforts.

AMEC's Integrated Evaluation Framework

Then, in 2016, along came AMEC's Integrated Evaluation Framework that puts the emphasis on setting objectives and measuring outcomes based on those objectives.3 Its interactive version is a tool that provides more than just guidance. It's very intuitive and simple to use so that any new practitioner (or even a student) can follow the steps to plan, execute, measure, and report on a fully integrated communications campaign.

The framework spans through each PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) channel and looks at the following points to get you to start planning your PR program (note, the order is important):

  1. img Objectives: what you want to achieve for the organization and for your communication.
  2. img Inputs: what you need in preparation for communication.
  3. img Activity: things you do to plan and produce your communication.
  4. img Outputs: what you put out that is received by target audiences.
  5. img Outtakes: what your audiences take from and do with your communication.
  6. img Outcomes: the effect that your communication has on audiences.
  7. img Impact: the results that are caused, in full or in part, by your communication.

Now, some of those terms might be confusing, so AMEC helps us here, too, with a great taxonomy table that provides more information about those points, including key steps, metrics, milestones, examples, and methods of evaluation for each.4

The new AMEC framework is more than just a measurement tool; it's a planning and execution tool that makes you decide on the appropriate metrics and choose the right activities, outputs, outtakes, and so on before you begin any PR activities. It's a strategic tool to improving and measuring organizational performance, but it is quite vast and detailed for the day-to-day practitioner. Whether it will be widely adopted is yet to be seen.

In fact, very few PR firms today are seeing any growth from insights, measurement, and analytics according to the recent World PR Report by the Holmes Report.5 That's a major concern for the PR industry.

As we can see, there are tools and frameworks that work, but why are they not accepted by the majority of PR professionals? Why do executives still devalue the necessity of PR because it can't be measured?

That, again, comes back to PR's inability to jump on the bandwagon, learn, and adapt to the new digital reality as quickly as their colleagues from marketing, advertising, sales, and so on. Professor Watson confirms that this reluctance to embrace measurement is not new. “Despite the emphasis placed on measurement by the IPR in the U.K. and leading U.S. texts, many pre-1980 texts reveal great reluctance by practitioners to evaluate the outcomes of their activity.” He adds that most PR people “faced with the difficulty and cost of evaluation, forget it and get on with the next job” (Watson 2011a, 8).

It's no surprise, then, that according to the 2016 Global Communications Report from the Holmes Report6 current measurement models are still alarmingly focused on measures of outputs—such as total reach or total impressions—rather than on business outcomes. Agency and client-side respondents rated total reach as the most common form of measurement (68 percent), followed by impressions (65 percent) and content analysis (64 percent) with less emphasis on brand perception (47 percent) or attempts to measure return on investment (41 percent) and 30 percent still using advertising value equivalents.

Social media measurement is equally unsophisticated. The most common metric reported by agency and client-side respondents is a simple count of followers (78 percent), followed by reach (77 percent) and interactions such as likes or comments (76 percent). By comparison, relatively few are tracking sentiment (62 percent), social listening, such as real-time monitoring on conversations (47 percent) or changes in opinion or action (36 percent).

My favorite quote on PR measurement, though, is John Pavlik's comment from his PR research book saying that “measuring the effectiveness of PR has proved almost as elusive as finding the Holy Grail” (cited in Macnamara 2015, 2).

Each year, there are multiple studies done to research the PR industry. I'm not joking when I say that in each and every one measurement remains the biggest challenge for PR professionals again and again even though they all recognize it as absolutely necessary. Just take a look at the European Communication Monitor,7 CIPR's State of the Profession,8 PRCA's Digital PR and Communications Report,9 or PR Academy's Annual Qualifications Survey.10

This is still so puzzling to me, especially because precisely thanks to digital, PR can be measured. Practitioners simply need to use the tools that are there and they need to learn from inbound.

Inbound Marketing and Measurement

The inbound marketing methodology was developed with measurement in mind. Each phase within it has a particular goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely (SMART) and numeric:

  1. img Attract is about turning strangers into visitors, hence creating traffic.
  2. img Convert is about turning visitors into leads that we can nurture.
  3. img Close is about closing those leads into customers.
  4. img Delight is about retaining these customers to turn them into promoters to bring new customers to us or nurture their repeat purchases.

Each one of those can be measured numerically.

Not only that, the methodology also gives us the tools for each phase that can be used to achieve the goals.

  1. img Attract uses SEO, keywords, blogging, and social media.
  2. img Convert uses calls to action (CTAs) on blogs to bring visitors to forms on landing pages.
  3. img Close uses customer relationship management (CRM) data to nurture the right leads through e-mail, marketing automation, or social selling.
  4. img Delight uses surveys, social media, or contextual marketing (smart content) to offer even more valuable content.

To each tool and technique, we can assign tactical, numeric goals. For example, we can designate a number of visits and traffic for each blog or a particular conversion rate on a CTA so that we know that when visitors come to our landing pages, 25 percent of them or more will convert there and become leads with known e-mail addresses.

But the most important part of the methodology is that through marketing activities we affect the bottom line; we attract actual clients. Following the steps in the methodology, this is fairly easy to measure, and that's exactly what all businesses want: more revenue through new clients or more purchases.

The best way to plan your metrics and activities is to start backward:

  1. img How much revenue do you need to make this year? How many customers/purchases does this translate to?
  2. img Based on your close and sales activities, how many good leads or sales-qualified leads (SQLs) do you need?
  3. img Based on the number of SQLs, how many leads in total do you need to ensure that you hit the SQL number (not all leads are going to be sales-ready or a good fit)?
  4. img Based on the number of leads, how much traffic do you need to be generating?

These yearly numbers can then easily be converted into monthly goals and tactics, such as how many content offers you might need to put on landing pages, how many blog posts you need to publish per month, how many sales reps you need, how much social activity or paid advertising you should do, and so on. You can plan your entire marketing and sales (and PR) organization around this and everyone will know what their targets and goals are. This awareness makes it easy to consistently track and evaluate results to steadily improve.

The Future of PR Measurement

We know that lack or misunderstanding of data is a key challenge in digital marketing. A recent McKinsey C-level executive survey underscores that by placing lack of data as the second top challenge, after the lack of talent.11

The reason doesn't lie in the lack of tools or technology because we have plenty. The data is there. It's the approach that hinders this.

Regardless of whether you work in PR, marketing, or advertising, you need to start with the bottom line's goals in mind. That's what you measure against and that's what you plan your campaign, initiative, or activity for.

People will say that PR is not always measurable because it deals with relationships, emotions, connections, and reputation. Yes, these are qualitative and hard to measure, but you can always put them against bottom line goals. Why are you building these relationships? What exactly is this going to bring you? How many of your customers buy again from you because of your good reputation? Do you ask in your purchase process or forms what the reason is for them to come back again?

For example, crisis communications is a big area for PR. Here, the focus shouldn't be only about saving your organization's reputation but also looking into the number of customers lost or retained. Depending on the depth of the crisis you can even set a SMART goal against this and measure accordingly.

Once you have established the SMART goals that relate to your bottom line, you can dig deeper into the smaller, tactical objectives and expectations that can ameliorate the effects of a crisis. The idea is to put data and analytics at the center of everything you do.

We said that PR today deals with four different types of media. Let's look at some examples of how you can measure each one.

Earned Media

  1. img Track referral traffic (use Google Analytics—it's free). Web analytics are hugely important in the digital era. You should evaluate how much referral traffic has come from media placements and how much from your own content, for example, owned media. Going deeper, you can track how many of those visitors have turned into leads, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) or SQLs, and customers. Then, by knowing the lifetime value of your customer—how much revenue they bring you per year—you'll be able to easily calculate the ROI of those PR activities each month, each quarter, each year.
  2. img Measure influencer relations referrals. If you are doing any type of influencer relations in which you partner with bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, or other well-known influencers in the digital space that are relevant to your business, track how much traffic their stories about you have generated. Also, just as above, have you generated any customers from these activities and referrals? With influencer and media placements it's important that the media people you work with have links to your website in their stories, otherwise you won't be able to track any of this.
  3. img Align with sales. Media placements are really good collateral for your sales team to use during the sales process because editorial stories or case studies are perceived as more credible than promotional content by your potential buyers. The question you need to answer here is: How can you ensure that you know when sales reps use any of this media collateral and what is the impact of the usage? The Sales Pro tools in HubSpot Sales can easily help you track this.

Shared Media

  1. img Measure social media promotion. How many of your social media posts brought people back to your website? How many of those converted on your forms? How many of those eventually became customers or media publishers?
  2. img Evaluate social sharing. Is your social media community sharing your posts with peers or colleagues? This is an important indicator that tells you whether your content is worth remarking on.
  3. img Track your total social reach. This will tell you how big your top of the funnel is on social media, which will give you an indication of how much more you need to grow it based on your overall goals.

Paid Media

  1. img Measure paid conversions. I'm a firm believer that the best use of paid promotion is to set up ads that bring you conversions rather than just traffic or impressions. This goes back to the usage of Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google ads rather than TV or radio ads. Here you should look at how many of the people who saw your ads converted into leads that you can nurture and close as customers or media publishers. Again, this is an easy journey to track if you have the right goals set up and the right software to evaluate each step.
  2. img Remarketing. This is another clever tactic that is easy to measure. Remarketing allows you to put targeted ads in front of people who have been at your website but have not become customers or publishers so you follow them around the web to encourage this.

Own Media

  1. img Track organic traffic. How many people are finding you organically thanks to your content? How many of them are converting into leads, MQLs, SQLs, or customers? And how many of them are actually journalists or influencers who proactively reach out to work with you on a story? Tracking these numbers will also give you an indication of your SEO and keywords ranking as well as insights into what you need to be doing more, for example blogging twice instead of once a week or building a designated subpage on your website for the media.
  2. img Evaluate the most effective content. Figure out which blog posts have the highest call-to-action (CTA) clicks and which landing pages are converting best. This will tell you which topics you need to focus on as well as whether you've designed a good experience for your website visitors.
  3. img Keep an eye on blog views and blog subscribers. This is another indication of whether your content is adding value for the people coming to your website, and the number should ideally be going up.
  4. img Track domain authority and backlinks or inbound links. These are some of the main SEO factors. The more websites that are linking back to your content and website, the higher your domain authority and the better you will rank, because it means that your website is more trustworthy and relevant. And who doesn't want to be on the first page of a Google search? That's where searchers stay; they don't click through to page 10 to find you. They don't even go as far as page two. More backlinks and a higher domain authority, in turn, will improve your organic traffic and with that your organic lead generation, too.
  5. img Assess average time on your website. How effective your website and content are is not just about the number of website visitors and conversions but also about how much time people who come to your website spend on it. This is easily tracked with Google Analytics, which also tracks your visitors from the first page they land on to all subsequent stops they make on other pages. In addition, this is a key metric for Google to rank websites.

Of course, these metrics need to be part of the appropriate report—daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. For example, high-level numbers like website visitors, leads, and total traffic conversion rates could be daily ones. Metrics related to blog views, blog subscribers, e-mail performance, inbound links, and rankings for one or two really important keywords could go into the weekly report. The monthly figures could include social reach, media referrals, landing page conversion rate, overall blog performance metrics, and traffic sources. For quarterly results, you might want to see what the most popular content has been for the last quarter as well as traffic source performance and organic ranking to make informed decisions about your activities for the next quarter. For the yearly report, you are also looking at these metrics to figure out the long-term effects of your efforts and to be able to plan strategically for the new year in terms of goals and then tactics.

One thing you'll see in the examples just noted is that none of them are vanity metrics such as followers, sentiment, or impressions. These don't really tell you anything unless you can very specifically tie them back to how they've boosted your bottom line. Vanity metrics are outputs not outcomes. Business owners and CEOs want the real numbers; they want actual proof of ROI, and the proof they often want is an increase in sales because it's measurable.

ROI for public relations, however, has always been difficult to demonstrate. When you add the inbound philosophy, it becomes possible; you know very well how your blog posts or media placements perform with regards to views and shares, the same goes for your landing pages and the conversion rates you get there. You know how many people open your e-mails and click on the links in them; you can track the entire journey of these website visitors and know when they become customers or publishers. What better way of proving the return on PR activities than tying each piece of content to a customer?

Using AMEC's Framework with Inbound

Let me give you a specific example here by applying the AMEC's framework and the inbound marketing methodology.

Objectives: What You Want to Achieve for the Organization and for Your Communication

As just noted, CEOs want ROI, which basically means that they want more sales and revenue. Your objective, then, should be to influence or create an increase in sales for the organization. To break this down a bit, with inbound PR (which is highly digitally driven) your goal should be to deliver an agreed upon number of MQLs to the sales team, which will then close these leads into customers. To do this, you need to set objectives for all communication that you are going to do to get there, for example, a very specific number of visits generated through your website or the media's content, leads converted thanks to your e-books, referral traffic tied to media placements, and so forth. All of this is, of course, based on the number of MQLs you need.

Inputs: What You Need in Preparation for Communication

In here, you need to have defined your target audience or buyer persona, as we'll explain later. Basically, who are those MQLs? What are their challenges, pain points, and goals? What are their demographic factors as well as behavioral attributes? How can you design your inbound PR activities to reach them with the content that they would be interested in and where they would find it? In addition, you also need a definition of an MQL that is agreed upon with the sales team, because each can have very different ideas of what an MQL needs to have done on your website or with your content to be a good fit for sales.

Activity: Things You Do to Plan and Produce Your Communication

Knowing that you need to deliver a certain number of marketing qualified leads within a defined target audience, by when and in what frequency, here's where you plan your inbound PR campaigns and everything included in them to get to that number, organized around an appropriate time frame. Your entire strategic plan comes in here—your content plan based on your numeric goals, campaigns (e-books, media articles, events, surveys), e-mail marketing, basically everything around PESO that you need to do to achieve the objectives.

For example, this month you need 30 MQLs and you are starting from scratch so you need to first attract people to your website via the relevant PESO channels. These might include blogging and social media (owned and shared media) and influencer/blogger relations or some press releases and magazine pieces (earned media), then showing these people a call to action to lead them to a landing page where they will fill out a form with their contact details and become a contact in your database for the first time. After that you will engage further with them with more content and e-mails and, based on their response to those second and third touch points, you'll determine if they are qualified enough to be passed along to sales. (That was a simplified example, but it explains the thought process.)

Outputs: What You Put Out That Is Received by Target Audiences

To analyze results, you need a clear picture of what you've done and all the tactics you have used. This is where you list all of these actions, for example, number of blog posts, e-mails, press releases, newsletters, social messages and so on. It's about the amount here rather than the quality or the effects. You still need to track these so that you know how much or how little you are doing so that next time you can plan better.

Outtakes: What Your Audiences Do with and Take Out of Your Communication

Here's where you count things like visits, followers, shares, retweets, comments, subscribers, clicks and open rates. This is about how your audience has initially reacted and responded to your communication efforts. It's more about your top of the funnel growth rather than nurtured leads, but it's necessary to increase and maintain a large enough base because not everyone will be a good fit for your business (often, your top of the funnel contact database will include competitors or students, for example, who won't fit your target customer requirements to buy).

Outcomes: Effect That Your Communication Has on Your Audiences

Outcomes is where we learn what effect your inbound PR efforts have had on the audience. What you should be measuring here is increase in traffic and traffic sources, generated leads, best converting content offers or types and tactics, increased referral traffic from influencer relations, endorsements, number of actual MQLs generated, and how all of these metrics have developed week by week and month by month. Trends and insights are important as they allow you to make informed decisions about your next campaigns. This is why you need a holistic view of what's working to constantly measure, optimize, and get better.

Impact: The Results That Are Caused, in Full or in Part, by Your Communication

And here we solve for ROI. Did sales close some customers from those remarkable 30 MQLs we gave them? How can we link this back to the starting point of bringing people to the website through blogging and media relations, converting them into leads, nurturing them into MQLs, and passing them onto sales? Did any of those MQLs bring to us other MQLs through referrals and endorsements and thus improved our reputation?

With inbound PR, PR is taking over a lot of the more traditional marketing activities but that's only natural and makes perfect sense—PR people excel at content and it is good, quality content that converts unknown visitors into leads. There are no good leads without good content. Nor are there any good relationships without added value.

To measure its results, PR needs to be aligned with sales. It's critical that everyone is on the same page and is working toward the same goals with a clearly defined funnel.

The future of PR measurement is practicing inbound PR because by using the inbound philosophy you start with the numbers that matter to the whole organization and only then do you plan your tactics.

Notes

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