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How to Measure Your Public Relations ROI

How do you know you are getting a good return on your investment of time and money in your public relations activities?

Getting a cause-effect breakdown (knowing which part of your PR is responsible for which part of the newfound success of your business) is not an exact science, but it is an art form that has developed considerably over the past decade as businesses demand to know their return on investment in every facet of their organizations.

Measuring PR is more qualitative than quantitative, but you can get a good sense of your success. Here are some methods of tracking your results to help you understand whether
you're getting the ROI you deserve for your efforts.

Tracking press clippings:

A stack of press clips, in itself, is not a particularly accurate scale for measuring PR success unless 1) they appear in the publications your prospects and other important audiences read and 2) they include your main messages—the reason you give interviews. You can compare your clips from one year to the next, and you will get a general sense of the improvement of your PR campaign. But don’t assume that the two-pound stack of clips you got this year is better than the one pound you got last year.

All clips are not created alike. A tiny mention in your big city paper will be more difficult to land than an article in a small weekly newspaper. But, for your audience—which may be your immediate neighborhood if you are a local music store or clothing boutique—the small weekly paper may be the better bet.

Media impressions:

This is also a widely used method that, frankly, can be misleading. It works this way: You take all of your press clips and multiply each one by the total circulation of the publication in which it appeared. So, if you got a mention in The Wall Street Journal, in theory, you achieved two million impressions (the number of people who potentially saw the mention of your company). But this method serves only as a blunt instrument to measure your effectiveness. First, the chances that all two million subscribers saw the mention of your company are small. Second, even if they did see it, did it register enough for them to remember you? Maybe you have achieved tens of millions of media impressions over a period of time but the numbers don’t really tell the story.

Also, equating media coverage to comparable advertising is difficult to quantify. A positive story about a company holds much more value than an ad of the same size, but how much more? It depends on the contents of the story, the placement, the messages conveyed, and the publication in which it appeared.

In order to be of value, a media placement must:

• Reach the right audiences
• Make an emotional connection between your products and the audience
• Include at least some of your messages
• Leave the audience with a positive impression of your company, product,
or service
• Be prominent (A small mention on the last page of the back section of
the paper is not of much value.)

Tracking messages:

This method owes more to a gut feeling than actual quantification, but it can give you a better sense of the way in which your messages are being picked up. Look at articles in which you have been quoted or mentioned. Take out your message document and compare your five to six main messages with what is contained in the articles. Check off how many times each message (they need not be verbatim) appears in print. If your count
is low, you know that you need to be more “on message” when you do your interviews.