It's not always easy for companies to understand or even demonstrate the value that they get from public relations efforts, especially when it comes to expressing the value and benefits to executives without any concrete numbers to support a case. There are plenty of different things that companies have to keep track of when it comes to their public relations efforts, and it's not always easy to pinpoint the right metrics to measure the success of those efforts. Fortunately, there are a handful of essential metrics that every company should keep track of to better understand the performance of its public relations efforts.
Media coverage
Companies should keep track of the media coverage that they are able to generate through their public relations efforts to figure out how their campaigns are performing, and whether the media coverage that the company has managed to generate happened through outreach, earned media, or purchased editorials. By tracking media coverage, as well as media opportunities, companies get an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of their overall campaigns. If a company is relatively well known in its market or its industry, it gives it a benefit of being a lot more selective with the media outreach campaigns, by targeting high profile and authoritative outlets. That's because even a single interview or a feature in this type of outlet tends to be worth a lot more to these types of companies compared to smaller trade outlets or even local ones. On the other hand, smaller companies tend to generate a lot of brand awareness even with a single mention in an article in a news outlet of any kind, which means that they shouldn't be dismissing smaller outlets and platforms at the beginning.
Website traffic
There are a few different types of website traffic that companies should keep track of throughout a public relations campaign to better understand to better understand the performance of the campaign. One of them is the new unique visitors metric, which is important for demonstrating how effective a public relations campaign from a company might be, because if a company successfully generates positive media coverage, the number of new unique visitors on this website should increase. Another important metric is the returning website visitors, which is also a metric of the performance of a public relations campaign, because when a person returns to a website, especially if they've already made a purchase, it shows that the campaign has been successful. Then there is the mobile visitors metric, which can help companies better understand whether their websites are fully optimized for mobile devices, and if potential customers aren't visiting the website through their mobile devices, or leave it as soon as they open it, it shows that the website is not accessible through the devices, and the company can work on improving its public relations efforts, as well as its customer experience.