How do you measure the results of PR?

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How do you judge the quality of a piece of coverage?

Use a few stable criteria. Does the outlet reach your customers, investors or future hires? Is your company the subject of the story or a passing mention? Did your key messages make it in? Is your spokesperson quoted by name? Is the article online, with a link to your site?

Use the same scorecard every month. The score matters less than the trend over time.

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Which metrics should you track beyond articles?

• Inbound requests that mention the press, captured with a "How did you hear about us?" field on your forms.
• Website traffic and branded searches after a piece runs.
• Direct requests from journalists, a sign your spokesperson is becoming a go-to source.
• Visibility in AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, checked monthly against a fixed set of questions.
• Business outcomes: leads, job applications, investor outreach.

As a volume benchmark, the five three-month engagements Linker has published as case studies generated between 7 and 15 pieces of coverage, with a median of 10.

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Should you use advertising value equivalency (AVE)?

No. AVE calculates what the same amount of ad space would have cost. But an article is not an ad: its value comes from third-party credibility, which that calculation ignores. The Barcelona Principles, published by AMEC, the international association for the measurement and evaluation of communication, reject AVE as a measure of the value of PR.

To go further, our guide to analyzing and measuring press coverage provides a six-criteria scorecard and the eight metrics to track, and our article on measuring the ROI of PR connects those metrics to business results.