The document discusses various ways to measure and evaluate the success of public relations campaigns. It emphasizes that defining specific, measurable goals upfront is important so success can be determined based on whether those goals were achieved. It then provides many examples of metrics that can be used, such as increases in sales, media impressions, audience awareness, and audience actions like purchases or information requests. It also discusses tools for tracking traditional media clips, online mentions, and website traffic. The overall message is that output metrics alone like clip counts are not sufficient and outcomes need to be tied to achieving the original objectives.

1. Measurement & Evaluation
Presented by
Brett Atwood

2. Success or Failure?
• How will you determine if your strategic plan
and campaign was a success?

3. “The Final Step”
• The final step in your planning is to determine
how you will measure and define “success”
– This will be the metric used to determine if your
campaign was a success or failure
• At the end of your campaign, you should
evaluate based on the metric that was agreed
upon at the beginning

4. Why Evaluate?
• To document success
• To encourage future work
• To justify your expenses
• To improve your future campaigns
• To build credibility
• To determine a basis for the next campaign
• To promote the value of PR in your organization

5. Things to Consider
• Was the campaign well planned?
• Did the recipients understand the message?
• What improvements can be made?
• Did you achieve your stated goals?
• Was the budget adequate?
• What is replicable for future campaigns?

6. Measuring Success
• There is a tendency for many PR practitioners
to measure their output, rather than the
achievement of their goals
– For example, collecting press clippings is not
enough

7. Measurement
• In order to measure success, you must first
define it
• As part of your research and strategic
planning phase, you and your client need to
agree on realistic goals for accomplishment
• This ensures that your work will be recognized
and disagreements will be minimized

8. Examples
• A defined increase in sales
• A specific number of mentions in the press
• A measured increase in public awareness of a
brand or service
• A pre-determined increase in customer direct
inquiries about a product or service

9. Clients from Hell
• The worst case scenario is ambiguous, ill-
defined goals
• This invites the client to challenge your work
and effectiveness

10. Clip Counting
• A physical counting of press placements will
measure productivity
• This may not truly represent success
• There is a temptation to send out excessive
releases to manipulate the perception of
productivity (and add to the client’s bill)

11. How to Get Clips
• Do not ask a journalist to
send you a clip
• There are several services
you can use:
– Cision
– Burrelle’s/Luce Press Clippings
– Hitwise
• These services are now
offered online

12. Message Impressions
• These services track “media impressions”
(a.k.a. “gross impressions”) to detail how
many people were exposed to the message
– This factors in the circulation and/or reach of the
media outlets that carried your message

13. Example
• A campaign for a new soda is mentioned in
several newspapers and magazines
• Add up the circulation of these publications to
get the estimated “media impressions”

14. Media Impressions
• Useful to track the penetration of a message
• However, the number can be misleading
• This number does not reflect how many
people actually saw the message – only how
many were exposed to it

15. Advertising Value Equivalency
• Since story placements are “free,” there is an
equivalent dollar value for the exposure
• What would it have cost your client to get the
same sort of exposure via paid placement
advertising?
• The AVE calculates the estimated value of the
exposure (in ad dollars)

16. AVE
• AVE helps to justify the expense of your PR
campaign costs
• However, it is not without controversy
– Not all media coverage is positive
– The value of the story space requires some
subjective judgment and is prone to exaggeration

17. Systematic Content Analysis
• Many of these software programs track the
intricacies of the media coverage
– Positive vs. negative coverage
– Relationship of the coverage vs. your competitors
– Contextualization of your coverage compared to
the overall placement opportunities in the media
outlet

18. Other Forms of Evaluation
• Monitor the Internet
– This includes “gripe groups” (anti-client blogs)
• Toll-free numbers
– How proactive are your customers?

19. Cost per Person
• It can be difficult to compare the value of
impressions across various forms of media
• The CPM (cost per thousand) index helps you
assign a dollar value to the expense of
reaching 1,000 people in a particular media
genre

20. Calculating CPM
• Divide the total number of media impressions
by the cost of your campaign
• Example: A $10 million campaign that reaches
100 million people would have a CPM of $10.
(It costs $10 to reach 1,000 people).

21. Monitoring Online Chatter
• There are multiple services that you can use to
monitor online chatter about your brand in social
media and across the web including:
– Google Alerts
– Hootsuite
– Tweetdeck
– Icerocket
– Social Mention
– Topsy

22. Measurement of Audience Awareness
• How many people know about your message
or campaign?
• You can conduct surveys to determine the
“audience awareness”

23. “Audience Attitudes”
• How does the public feel about your
company, brand, product or service?
• You can measure “audience attitudes” using
benchmark studies that test attitudes both
before and after exposure to the message

24. Audience Action
• What action does the audience take as a
result of the exposure to your message?
– Do they buy your product?
– Do they talk about you?
– Did they request more information?
– Did they enter your contest?

25. Web Site Analytics
• Leaders in this space include:
– Google Analytics
– Omniture
– WebTrends
– Hitwise