The best PR campaign KPIs

This is also true for a PR campaign; it needs to relate, it needs to engage with an audience in order to increase the awareness of the business involved, otherwise the efforts could be for nothing.

At Distract, we look at campaigns with different KPI goals that are relevant to the task at hand, as this can accurately measure how well the campaign is doing throughout its time.

With that, here’s five of the best KPI to measure for a PR campaign.

Quality of Content

There’s an old saying of ‘quality over quantity’, and that’s no more true than in copy for a campaign. Whether that’s in a one-line advertisement on a poster, or a chapter in an ebook, it needs to clearly communicate what the business is trying to show to new customers.

Generate Leads

No matter what content has been created for the campaign in question, it needs to be tracked to see whether or not it generates the high-quality leads that the business is expecting.

From cost-per-leads to click-through rates, the content should encourage readers to contact them through a form on their landing page for example, and in turn analyse which channels work best for the campaign.

Social Shares

This may be an obvious point, but it’s incredibly important to share the content across the relevant social channels. Whether that’s on Twitter or TikTok, the content could potentially be picked up by other outlets and social handles that could result in more views and engagement for the content you’re sharing.

The larger the shares, the bigger the audience base will be, and it can help introduce new customers to the business in avenues that weren’t considered before.

Audience Interaction

This is a KPI that has changed over the years, but with the rise of the internet and its expansion into online content, audiences have never had it easier in responding to content through comments, retweets and shares on social media.

Even podcasts where they take questions from audiences by email, it can help a business relate to their customers much more directly, and respond even faster to feedback if a new service or product has launched during their PR campaign.

Mentions in the Media

A major point of PR is making sure that the content is visible in as many areas as possible, and that extends to the media. From podcast mentions, to newspaper insights, TV clips and articles on websites, it’s a key metric in many campaigns to see just how the content is being understood and picked up by the media.

A blog post for a client could be shared across many avenues and could help generate many views and leads, so it helps to have this KPI at the forefront, otherwise a big chunk of awareness could be missed out here.

There may be other KPIs to measure for a campaign that may need to track a number of followers/subscribers, or how many views a specific article has been viewed. It’s important to cater the measurements to the campaign, in order to evaluate how well it’s being received, and how it could be improved upon if the client wants something similar in the coming months to better appeal to an audience.