Measuring PR: The Difficult but Necessary Job

Understanding why you should measure PR activity is the key to future campaign success, explains Account Executive Tom Horn.

Measuring PR activity is difficult. Unlike other areas such as sales, the benefits of PR are felt over the long term. The full extent of the success or failure of a PR campaign cannot be ascertained solely by reviewing at a series of numbers and targets but instead by looking at the cumulative effects over time.   

This makes assessing the success of a campaign a complicated process, which can be off-putting to entrepreneurs. In some ways this is logical: why would you want to spend valuable time undertaking the difficult process of reviewing a campaign which is already complete?

However, there is considerable value in measuring PR, so here are three reasons why you should evaluate and measure your campaigns.

Accountability

Many people fear measurement. They see it as a way of apportioning blame, not as a useful tool for evaluation.

This is understandable, as for too long employers have used arbitrary numbers as a black and white measure of performance and a way of punishing employees. However, if used constructively, measurement can act as an encouragement, not a threat.  

Setting clear and measurable objectives at the start of a campaign means that there can be no deniability or obfuscation about who is responsible for what and what the team has to achieve through a campaign. Doing so ensures that every team member has a clear role and a clear incentive to deliver on it.

Once the campaign is over, if a certain segment has over or under performed your measurements will provide an evidence based starting point for a constructive discussion about why, and what can be done to improve performance next time.

Without measuring campaign objectives, it’s impossible to have such constructive, evidence-based conversations, which improve team performance while avoiding the ‘blame game’.

Comparison

Having objective measures of success allows for more direct comparisons between campaigns.

If similar measures are used across a series of campaigns, then almost like for like comparisons can be made between them: extremely useful information when trying to evaluate what types of campaigns to run in the future and how much resource to allocate to them.

While it can be counterproductive to look back and attempt to replicate past success, if a tactic isn’t broken, then fixing it is a waste of time and energy. Assessing what works for you and maximising its success is the most efficient use of your time and resources.

Optimisation

Similarly, identifying and replicating successful elements within a campaign is the best way to optimise the performance of a future project.

When a campaign has been successful overall, it can seem futile to measure and evaluate its individual elements. However, such detailed analysis can identify areas which are outperforming others, and those which are underperforming despite the overall success of the campaign.

This facilitates bespoke optimisation of a campaign, small changes across areas which underperformed to make a successful campaign even more successful. If done effectively and on a wide enough scale, this can have a significant impact on overall performance.

Measuring a PR campaign provides valuable information for evaluating and improving future delivery. However tiresome it is to undertake, there’s no doubting its necessary to achieve peak performance.  

If you’d like to find out more about measurement and evaluation, listen to our podcast Turning Up the Volume, where we discuss how to measure PR and why it’s important to do so.