How To Measure The Impact of Digital PR

Back in the 1940s, the PR industry developed Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) as a way of measuring the value of earned media coverage by assessing how much it would cost to buy ad placements of a similar size.

In 2024, this is largely irrelevant, with many (although not all) PR professionals abandoning this metric. This is due to its oversimplification, and lack of ability to accurately reflect the impact of PR on brand awareness, reputation, and business outcomes.

While the industry has progressed immensely, with digital PR becoming the modern version of traditional PR, there is still no standardisation for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of this discipline. Agencies and businesses will differ in how they assess the success of their PR activity, with some struggling with its more intangible nature. It’s for this reason that digital PR sometimes gets deprioritised in favour of search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) or paid social.

Fortunately, there are metrics that crop up time and time again, which agencies and businesses have begun to cherry-pick for their reporting. Whether you’re new to digital PR, or looking to refine how you report on its value, here are a few performance markers worth considering.

Brand Mentions

We could also call this metric ‘brand awareness’. We can make brand awareness more tangible by looking at the output of campaigns and the amount of coverage generated over a six month period. If you only have one campaign rolled out across that timeframe, you’ll have fewer results than if you deployed a ‘layered strategy’ with various PR tactics running concurrently. The former will naturally generate fewer brand mentions as there will be more peaks and troughs with results.

In digital PR, brand mentions are seen as less valuable than backlinks (which can help to increase search rankings), but should you really discount being featured in a print magazine with a highly relevant target audience just because you won’t get a link from it?

Among the digital PR community, there is also a belief that brand mentions (without a link) may have a positive impact on rankings. This is the interpretation of Google’s patent on ‘implied links’, filed in 2014.

An increase in brand awareness can also be measured by more:

• Brand searches (see Google Search Console for granular data, or Google Trends for a general sense of popularity over time)
• Brand impressions (see Google Search Console)
• Organic traffic (check Google Analytics)
• New users (check Google Analytics)
• Brand perception surveys (consider third-party survey platforms)

Relevance and Authority

Long gone are the days where businesses could get featured anywhere and everywhere and reap the benefits in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Google is constantly refreshing its algorithm to stop manipulative practices and provide users with the most relevant results, written by humans, for humans.

Relevancy became even more of a hot topic a few months ago when Google faced a massive leak of internal documentation. The leak suggests that the search engine is probably ignoring links that don’t come from a relevant source. It also favours content that is fresh.

This is why it’s always a case of quality vs quantity. Are you getting your brand into the right publications, read by the right people (your target audience), or are you just taking a splatter gun approach and seeing what lands?

The reputation of publications is also key. Using a tool such as Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush, you will get an indication of how trustworthy and authoritative a website is, with a Domain Authority (DA) or Domain Rating (DR) score given from 0-100. In theory, a link from a high authority site will pass more SEO equity to your site, but in reality, that’s only part of the equation. If it’s not from a relevant site, it’s likely to matter less.

Backlink Acquisition

The Google leak confirmed that backlinks are still extremely valuable for SEO. Backlinks take a user from one site to another, and are seen as a ‘vote of confidence’.

Here’s where it gets slightly complicated. Links can be followed or 'nofollow', which dictates whether Google bots are likely to crawl the link and pass SEO equity. Some businesses put a lot of emphasis on followed links because they hold more weight, but nofollow links are natural and help to provide a diverse backlink profile. They also hold value, just not as much.

As with the point above, it’s great to receive an influx of links, but are they from sites Google would expect your brand to get links from? This is why it’s fine to have a target number of links in mind, but having this as a KPI doesn’t provide the full picture.

It’s also important to be realistic with any targets. According to freelance digital PR specialist Tom Chivers, over half (55%) of digital PR campaigns build fewer than 10 links. His research was based on the analysis of 4,799 campaigns, with 15% achieving 21-50 links, and 7.9% achieving between 51 and 100.

You may think the statistics look bleak – and they are if it’s virality you’re looking for – but if getting a handful of links in reputable and relevant publications is what you’re after then campaigns are a fantastic way to achieve your goals and help to ‘move the needle’.

Research by digital marketing agency Digitaloft offers similar statistics. Analysing the success of 500 digital PR campaigns, it found 29% of campaigns secure between 10 and 24 links from unique domains. And campaigns are just as likely to secure 1-9 links as they are 25-49 (22% and 21% respectively.

Referral Traffic, Leads and Conversions

Whether a link is followed or ‘nofollow’, you’ll be able to see any referral traffic from a publication. This can be viewed in Google Analytics by going to Reporting > Life Cycle (Acquisition) > Traffic Acquisition. Filter by ‘referral’ and ‘session source’ and you’ll be able to see which URLs are driving traffic to your website.

You will also be able to see how ‘engaged’ users are, along with a percentage of users that perform a ‘key action’, such as making a purchase or signing up. As digital PR is typically a top-of-the-funnel activity, you should see these things as a bonus. If you focus solely on the number of direct leads/sales you receive from the links and coverage you’re landing, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Ranking Improvements

PR alone is unlikely to result in ranking improvements if it’s built on shaky foundations (i.e. a website with poor technical SEO and content). If everything else is in hand, with any technical issues resolved, then links can make all the difference when it comes to closing the competitor gap - or getting ahead of competitors, and maintaining a top position.

While homepage links are highly regarded, spreading any SEO equity to the rest of the site, links to deeper pages are gold. This is why digital PRs typically build targeted landing pages for their campaigns, featuring internal links. When publications link to the landing page, the ‘SEO juice’ will flow through the internal links and give a boost to the areas of the site that need it most.

Ranking improvements should be seen as a shared goal (with SEO) as opposed to an owned goal (which PR directly affects). PRs can make their impact more tangible by plotting any coverage and links received within SEO tools which display search position changes over time, such as SEranking or Semrush.

Choosing Your Metrics

These are just a few metrics worth tracking, but there are others you may want to look into such as social media engagement, share of search/voice, and sentiment analysis.

The metrics you choose to report on will likely depend on what your overall business and marketing objectives are, and how much PR can realistically influence these goals. Having this data at your fingertips will help you to refine your strategies over time, once you know what works and what doesn’t, and better demonstrate the value that PR brings to the digital marketing mix.