Measuring PR when there is nothing to click

Every PR team has had the meeting where a client asks what the coverage was worth and the honest answer is that it does not convert into a single number cleanly. The temptation, under pressure, is to produce one anyway.

Ad value equivalent is a proxy, so label it

AVE takes the space the coverage occupied and prices it as if you had bought it as advertising. As a measure of value it is imperfect in ways everyone in the industry already knows: earned coverage and paid space are not equivalent, and a multiplier applied to make up the difference is a decision rather than a fact.

That does not make it useless. It makes it a proxy, and proxies are fine as long as they are labelled as proxies. What is not fine is a figure whose derivation nobody in the room can explain when a client asks.

If a client asks where a number came from, the answer should take one sentence. If it takes a paragraph, you are defending a number rather than reporting one.

Set your own constants, and keep them still

Whatever multipliers and rates you use, they should be your agency's, written down, and unchanged between months. A number that moves because the method moved is worse than no number at all, because it looks like progress.

Keeping the constants in one place also means that when you do revise them, you can restate the previous months on the same basis rather than presenting a step change nobody can interpret.

Capture the evidence on the day

Online articles get edited, moved behind paywalls and taken down. A link captured in March may prove nothing in June, and reconstructing a quarter of coverage at reporting time is where PR reporting actually falls apart.

A screenshot stored with the record on the day the piece lands costs almost nothing and is the difference between a report and a list of dead links. It is also the only version of the article that shows what it said before anyone amended it.

Report what PR is actually for

Coverage volume is the easiest thing to count and the least useful thing to report. Thirty pieces in outlets nobody in the target market reads is a worse month than three in the right ones, and a client who is paying attention knows that.

• Which outlets ran it, and whether they are the ones the client actually wanted.
• Whether the message survived, quoted or paraphrased, or whether the piece ended up being about something else entirely.
• Share of voice against named competitors, if that is the objective.
• Spokesperson visibility, if the brief was to build a profile rather than promote a product.
• The pieces that did not run, and why, because that shapes the next pitch more than the ones that did.

Connect it to something the business recognises

PR rarely owns a conversion, but it usually correlates with something the client already watches: branded search volume, direct traffic, inbound enquiries that mention an article. None of these prove causation and you should not claim they do.

Showing coverage against them on the same timeline, and saying plainly that this is correlation, is more persuasive than a fabricated single figure. It also invites the client to bring their own data, which turns reporting into a shared exercise rather than a defence.

Be the one who says it first

The agencies that lose PR accounts on measurement are usually not the ones with weak numbers. They are the ones who let a client discover, unprompted, that a headline figure was softer than it looked. Saying what a number can and cannot support, before anyone asks, is the cheapest credibility available in this discipline.