Measuring PR is harder than measuring paid advertising. Unlike Google Ads or a social media campaign, PR outcomes do not arrive with a dashboard. This creates a recurring problem: companies either abandon measurement entirely or fall back on metrics that look precise but tell the wrong story.
The two most widely used PR metrics, Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) and Share of Voice (SoV), are both useful as rough indicators and both routinely misapplied. AVE assigns an estimated advertising value to earned coverage. SoV measures your media presence against competitors. Neither tells you whether the right people read the coverage, what they took from it, or whether it moved any of the outcomes that matter to the business.
What follows is a framework for measuring PR results that captures both what can be counted and what can only be assessed, and is honest about the limits of each.
A six-step framework for measuring PR results
1. Set clear goals before the campaign starts
Measurement that happens after a campaign is largely retrospective justification. The metrics that matter are the ones tied to objectives set at the start: increase awareness among a specific audience, generate coverage in specific publications, shift perception on a specific topic, support a product launch in specific markets. Without that clarity upfront, there is no baseline to measure against.
SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) give the programme a shape that reporting can actually reflect.
2. Know your audience precisely
Coverage in a high-reach general title is not the same as coverage in the trade publication your buyers actually read. The target audience should define which media matter, and therefore which coverage counts. A SoV measurement that treats all outlets equally will misrepresent reality for any company with a specific B2B audience.
3. Choose your channels deliberately
PR works across earned media, owned channels and, increasingly, combinations of earned coverage and paid distribution. A feature article carried by a key trade title has a different value from the same article boosted through paid social to reach a defined audience. Both can be right for different objectives. The channel mix should follow the strategy, not the other way around.
4. Define KPIs jointly with your agency
The most useful KPIs are set together by the company and the PR team, tied to business priorities and planned activities, and expressed in terms of the agreed media target group. Coverage volume alone is a weak KPI. Coverage in the five publications that reach your buyers, with positive tonality and your key message present, is a strong one.
5. Measure, evaluate and assess: quantitatively and qualitatively
Professional media monitoring tools track what is being said about your brand, your competitors and your market. Web analytics show whether coverage drives traffic. Social listening captures conversation beyond formal media. These tools provide the quantitative layer.
The qualitative layer, which a tool cannot provide, is the assessment of an experienced PR professional: Is this coverage reaching the people who make buying decisions? Is the narrative moving in the direction we intended? Is our material interesting to the journalists who cover this space? That judgement is what makes the numbers meaningful.
6. Understand the limits of AVE and SoV
AVE estimates what you would have paid for the same space as advertising. The problem: ad prices vary widely, agencies receive significant discounts, and an expert opinion piece carries more weight with a reader than a banner ad of the same size. AVE collapses these distinctions into a single number that is more useful as a rough order of magnitude than as a reliable measure of impact.
Share of Voice is more meaningful when applied carefully. The risks are well-known among practitioners but often overlooked when SoV is reported upward: reach is not the same as reach within your target audience, and tonality is not always factored in. Monitoring SoV against named competitors in your specific target media, with tonality applied, gives a picture that is worth acting on. Monitoring overall SoV across all media does not.
What measurement cannot replace
The communications industry has been trying to develop a single, objective PR metric for decades. None has achieved the status of the click-through rate in digital advertising. The reason is not a failure of measurement methodology; it is that the value of a well-placed story in the right publication at the right moment involves judgement that quantitative tools are not built to capture.
That is where experienced PR professionals earn their place. Not by producing a dashboard, but by answering the questions that matter: Is our material of genuine interest to the journalists who cover this space? What is our visibility compared to the competition in the outlets that actually influence our buyers? Does our work advance the company’s communication objectives, or is it activity for its own sake?
Measurement that combines hard data with that kind of qualitative assessment gives a picture that is honest about what is working and what is not.