One of the reasons PR, and earned media in general, were historically undervalued was because metrics for measuring success didn’t carry the same credibility as other business metrics. Business leaders and board members want metrics that demonstrate undeniable results in exchange for the cost and effort.
In short, if you spend money on a PR team, tools, or an agency, what are you getting in return besides the pride of a piece of coverage? More so, you’re not getting a flashy New York Times profile every week. So, how do you justify excitement around coverage in a trade when you’re paying a team tens of thousands of dollars (or more) every month? Anyone who’s worked in PR and comms knows it’s not that simple.
The key is building credibility internally so that they trust your measurement just as much as they trust the CFO’s revenue and spending projections and the marketing team’s ad clicks. That said, it would be so. much. easier. if PR metrics stopped living in the abstract and had the same credibility as other business metrics. Enter readership–the number of unique visitors to news articles about your brand (or the executives that work for it).
Comparing Readership to Standard Business Metrics
Here’s a beginner list of 5 standard business metrics that readership stacks up against:
- Website Traffic: Marketing teams can see how many people are visiting each page of your brand’s website and when. Readership measures traffic to earned media coverage by showing you how many unique visitors each news article about your brand receives (readers) and aggregate readership over time.
- Campaign Clicks: Just like marketing teams can see click rates marketing emails and ad campaigns, readership measures clicks to the articles that mention your brand and how it compares to similar coverage. It helps you see what reporters and publications are giving you the highest return on your effort–and points you towards a data-backed media strategy.
- Content Engagement: Views and downloads (and listens) is how your content marketing team measures success on owned content. Readership is literally almost the same metric. How many people visited and viewed your media coverage. That’s it. Read more: how to compare owned content with earned press.
- Ad Spend: The much maligned methodologies behind Ad Value Equivalency (AVE) have damaged the reputation of PR reporting, in my opinion. We created Memo Readership Value (MRV) to give people a real calculation of earned media coverage vs ad spending. MRV calculates the cost it would take through advertising channels to drive the same amount of traffic to a piece of content as readers to a specific article. You can learn more about MRV if you’re interested in diving deeper.
- ROI: All departments look at cost of operations vs. revenue. Marketing, for example, knows how many views an ad got for the amount of spend behind it. Understanding how many people are reading your coverage gives you a clear calculation of attention you’re attracting relative to the PR team’s spend. It really is as simple as that.
TL;DR
Archaic metrics under-report the value of your work and leave room for dismissal from other business leaders. Get more credibility with metrics that measure what your counterparts are using.
Learn more about how customers leverage readership for real business insights.