How good is your PR?

Evaluating the effectiveness of PR can be very difficult. As a rule, public relations is about effective long-term play. However, there is a set of KPIs that help a business understand if its communication is moving in the right direction. Moreover, depending on the goals set, different indicators need to be applied to different cases.

What are the typical tasks for a PR specialist? The classic goals of public relations are as follows:

• Increase brand awareness;

• Promote a product or an important event within the company;

• Outperform a competitor;

• Cope with a crisis situation;

• Improve the reputation of the company, etc.

In order not to turn the assessment of PR into an endless reinvention of the bicycle, you can consistently rely on specific indicators. All these metrics can be calculated manually (actually, some must be calculated by hand only), but special automated systems also come to the aid of Russian PR specialists: Medialogy, SCAN Interfax, Brand Analytics, etc. You can quickly see almost any PR indicators in them.

PR of the company/product/event.

The long debate about whether public relations affects sales is not over. We believe that it does, but the exact way depends on the specific case. Still, there are some universal PR metrics for the vast majority of campaigns. Here are nine key metrics that help convert PR into numbers:

MO (Media Outreach) is an indicator of audience coverage. If the material is published in the printed press, the MO is calculated based on the data on the circulation of the publication, taking into account the penetration coefficient (the average number of readers of one copy of one issue of the publication). If we talk about online media, then the average number of unique visitors to an online resource per week is taken into account when calculating coverage.

SoV — Share of Voice. Shows the share of mentions of one company/product among all competing enterprises/products in its area. SoV is calculated like this: the total number of mentions of all players is divided by the number of mentions of a particular brand or product.

KM — Key Message. A cool indicator that takes into account not just product or brand mentions, but also publications and quotes that convey the main message of the PR campaign. Unfortunately, this analysis will have to be carried out manually, so determining the KM for large amounts of information is not an easy task.

MFI (Media Favorability Index) shows the emotional coloring of the text. We count all positive mentions of a company or product and divide by all negative ones for the same reporting period. The higher the result, the better. If it turns out to be less than one — we’re in trouble. In normal, non-crisis situations, it is enough to calculate this metric once a month.

MV (Media Visibility) — an indicator of coverage public response. It helps to compare not only the number, but also the tone of PR campaigns for different periods, with different products, or even for different brands. MV is countred simply: we put +2 for each positive mention, +1 for a neutral one, and subtract 2 for a negative one. Then we compare the received numbers. Whoever has more points wins.

MediaIndex is a special indicator of Medialogy. It is calculated automatically using the technology of linguistic and visual analysis according to the platform’s own methodology. MediaIndex is an important metric, because mentions do differ. In any message, you can be in the main, secondary or episodic role. You need to understand that the weight of an article devoted entirely to a product is much greater than, say, five articles in which it was simply mentioned along with others. An expert column with a photo of a company leader and a direct quote on the front page of a newspaper or magazine is no match for an event announcement where he or she is simply mentioned as a speaker. The status, influence and citation of the media itself also play a significant role.

IC — citation index. Shows the quality of information dissemination. It takes into account the number of links to the source, the weight of the mention and the social influence of the media.

Affinity index — matching index. Denotes the ratio of a brand’s rating among the target audience to its rating among the base audience. The relevance index shows how much better the target audience was in contact with the event than the general public. This indicator directly speaks about the quality of placement of materials.

The number of mentions/publications is the total number of published materials in the media with a mention of a company or product. A big plus of this indicator is the ease of calculation. However, you should not evaluate a PR campaign only by the number of publications because it only shows the number of published materials. Not a word about their quality. As well as about the quality and coverage of the media itself. Also, if there is a negative event associated with your company, you will get a lot of mentions, but you probably won’t be happy about it.

Digital PR

Now, probably, there is not a single PR campaign that would involve only the classic print media and television and would not be presented on the Internet. So, apart from the indicators mentioned above, you can safely add such web analytics metrics as:

coverage;

Number of subscribers;

Conversions (clicks, downloads, purchases);

Audience engagement (likes, comments, reposts);

The number of visits to the site / account;

Time on the site or in the account;

Page view depth;

traffic sources;

Growth of organic (not purchased) traffic;

Brand Metrics (indicators of increasing brand awareness);

CPM (Cost Per Mille — price per 1000 banner or ad impressions);

CPC (Cost Per Click — the amount that the advertiser pays for one user click on the ad);

CM Index (a social media mention quality metric developed by Medialogy, showing how much a brand has captured the attention of the audience, what is its real “weight” in social networks).

This is not a complete, but quite exhaustive list of digital promotion metrics. If a PR specialist faces non-trivial tasks, it makes sense to learn more about relevant KPIs for measuring results.

Anti-crisis PR

In assessing public relations, there is another extremely important point — the tone of the message. This is a qualitative rather than quantitative indicator that takes into account the positive or negative coloring of messages about a brand or product.

The tone of mentions is important for any PR campaign and definitely comes out on top in anti-crisis PR. Like many others, this metric can be collected manually or using automated systems. In this case, the dynamics of change in tone is important. For example, if last month 98% of mentions were negative, and this month it’s only 20%, that’s a win. Anti-crisis PR has worked. Another scenario: the number of mentions has increased, but the weight of the negative has remained the same. This is also a good result, but it is still better to work on reducing the negative.

Also, in anti-crisis PR (and in PR with the aim of getting around a competitor), it is advisable to monitor the MFI indicator (Money Flow Index). This is a cash flow index — the intensity with which money is invested in or withdrawn from a security. In Russia, it is hardly ever used, which is a pity.

For anti-crisis PR, the following KPIs can be singled out separately:

• Deadline for the topic to disappear;

• Number of blocked news;

• Term of whitewashing the topic;

• Amount of hidden information.

Important note

Often in the pursuit of high KPIs, companies lose sight of the real purpose of communications. It’s easy to slip into the anxious situation when you constantly look back at competitors: “They have 1000 mentions, and we only have 500 — God, we are losers!”. Not at all in fact. Because it’s not just the number of mentions that matters, but their quality, tone, context, and the successful representation of the main idea and values ​​of the brand. If out of 1000 mentions of competitors there are only 50 full-fledged materials while each of your 500 mentions is cool, you’re doing really better

At the same time, there are cases when classic KPIs are completely unsuitable for evaluating the effectiveness of a PR campaign. For example, a business needs to establish relations with some department or a specific decision maker. At the same time, it does not matter at all how many mentions this business gets. If in six months there is a call with a desired proposal from the needed people, the game was worth the candle, and the PR people did their job brilliantly. Firstly, because the purpose was achieved , and secondly because they were courageous enough to pursue the strategy and wait for the results to come without losing head for half a year

Also, PR often leads not to quantitative, but to qualitative results. For example, it helps the company enter a prestigious rating, and its leader or experts are constantly invited to business events as speakers. Not bad. Therefore, a couple of quality indicators can be added to the listed metrics.

And the most important thing. KPIs should be related to the ultimate goal of communication, not just keep PR managers under constant pressure.

So, we wish everyone effective campaigns and adequate clients and bosses who don’t doubt the importance of PR and understand that not all tasks can be solved in one day with a click.