PR and earned media impact is measured through brand tracking surveys, share of voice analysis, search uplift, and marketing mix modelling. AVE (advertising value equivalent) is widely discredited and should be replaced with metrics that connect coverage to actual audience and business outcomes.
PR is one of the hardest marketing disciplines to measure, and one of the most commonly measured badly. AVE, which calculates how much a piece of coverage would have cost as paid advertising, has been criticised by industry bodies including AMEC (the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) for decades. Yet it still appears in many agency reports because it produces impressive-looking numbers that clients expect to see.
Why AVE fails as a PR metric
AVE treats a quarter-page editorial feature in a national newspaper as equivalent to a quarter-page paid ad in the same paper. But readers engage with editorial differently from advertising. Coverage can be positive, negative, or neutral. A crisis story that dominates your brand's news coverage might generate a large AVE while actively damaging your business. The metric tells you nothing about quality, sentiment, or audience.
Coverage quality scoring replaces AVE with a framework that rates each piece of coverage on factors including message delivery (did the story include your key messages?), audience reach (how many relevant people likely saw it?), and sentiment. This produces a much more useful comparison across coverage items and over time.
Share of voice: a relative measure
Share of voice (SOV) measures how much of the total media conversation in your category is about your brand versus competitors. It is calculated by dividing your brand's coverage volume or reach by the total coverage volume for the category. A rising SOV in a stable market predicts future market share growth, based on evidence from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and others.
SOV is most useful when tracked continuously against a consistent set of competitors and sources. A one-off SOV snapshot tells you your current position. A trend over time tells you whether your PR programme is building or losing relative prominence.
- Define your competitive set and the sources you will monitor before you start tracking SOV. Changing the definition midway invalidates comparisons.
- Track both volume SOV (number of pieces) and reach SOV (estimated audience for those pieces). They sometimes diverge.
- Separate owned and earned coverage in your SOV tracking. Earned media SOV is a purer measure of PR performance.
- Monitor sentiment SOV alongside overall SOV. A brand with high share of voice that is predominantly negative is in a worse position than the volume metric suggests.
Brand tracking: measuring awareness and perception
Brand tracking surveys, run continuously with a consistent methodology, are the most direct way to connect PR activity to audience perceptions. Coverage that nobody recalls changes no metrics. Coverage that shifts prompted or spontaneous awareness demonstrates genuine impact.
When a major PR story breaks, brand tracking that runs weekly or fortnightly will capture any awareness spike in the period immediately following the coverage. This links the PR activity to a measurable audience response. Over time, sustained positive coverage correlates with rising consideration and brand preference in tracking data.
Search uplift from PR coverage
Significant PR stories generate branded search behaviour. People who read about your brand in the press often search for you shortly afterwards. Monitoring Google Trends and Google Search Console data around the timing of major coverage placements reveals whether that coverage drove search intent. A spike in branded search following a prominent piece of coverage is direct evidence that the story reached and engaged an audience.
This is particularly useful for earned coverage from events, product launches, or brand campaigns. Map each significant coverage moment against the search trend data and build a library of these correlations over time. Consistent patterns build a credible evidence base for the commercial value of PR.
Marketing mix modelling and PR
Including PR activity in an MMM is technically possible but requires a quality measure of PR intensity over time. A weekly index of coverage reach, weighted by sentiment and message delivery, can serve as the PR variable in the model. The challenge is building that index consistently, which requires either a robust media monitoring platform or manual coding of coverage.
Where PR is included in MMM, it typically shows a lag effect (its sales influence comes days or weeks after the coverage appears) and a relatively low short-term coefficient but a meaningful long-term contribution through brand equity. This pattern reflects how PR actually works: it builds reputation and familiarity over time rather than driving immediate sales spikes.
How do I measure the impact of crisis PR or negative coverage?
Brand tracking is the most direct tool. Monitor prompted and spontaneous awareness, consideration, and brand image attributes immediately following a crisis. Sentiment in earned media coverage gives you the volume of negative noise. Search volume for brand-related terms including your brand name plus negative terms like "complaint" or "review" gives you a signal of audience concern. MMM can, in principle, model the sales impact of negative coverage events if they are large enough and distinct enough in timing to be separable from other factors.
Can media monitoring tools replace a full measurement framework?
No. Media monitoring tools tell you what was written about your brand, where it appeared, and what reach it might have achieved. They do not tell you whether anyone read it, recalled it, changed their perception, or took any action as a result. Monitoring tools are an input to measurement, not a substitute for it. Pair monitoring data with brand tracking surveys and, where possible, behavioural signals like search uplift to build a complete picture.
Should PR be measured separately from brand marketing or as part of a combined measurement system?
As part of a combined system wherever possible. PR does not operate in isolation. A PR story amplified by paid social, referenced in email campaigns, and appearing alongside a TV campaign produces a different and usually larger effect than the same story alone. Marketing mix modelling is the best tool for separating these contributions, but it requires all channels to be represented in the model. Keeping PR measurement in a separate silo, reported in coverage metrics while other channels are reported in revenue metrics, makes it impossible to compare PR ROI against paid media ROI on a consistent basis.