Strategies to Find the Right Metrics to Measure Your Company’s ROI

[Editor’s Note: This is fourth in a series of Intrado Digital Media-sponsored articles about measurement. The previous three articles appeared in the November 2019, December 2019 and January 2020 editions, respectively, of PRNEWS.]

Say what you will about the digital age, but it’s never been easier to measure. Nearly everything communicators do professionally leaves a digital footprint, and thus is measurable.

So why address the topic of finding the right metrics for your company’s ROI? Wouldn’t it be simpler to measure everything communicators do? You’d likely spend your day doing nothing but measuring.

Measurement’s Path to Insights

More important, though, choosing random activities to measure is unlikely to offer wisdom that can be applied to communications goals or your company’s objectives.

“You don’t measure everything, because you don’t need to,” says Jon Meakin, West Coast lead and global head of strategic services at Grayling. “You need to boil it down to a few things that really make a difference” to your goals.

As Johna Burke, global managing director of AMEC, the international measurement group, says, “My angle on the ‘right metric’ for a company’s communicators will always be [to choose metrics that track with] what that the communicator is trying to accomplish.”

When you don’t know what your communications goals are, metrics aren’t going to be helpful, Burke says, emphasizing the importance of ensuring goals are agreed upon at the outset of a campaign.

An additional reason to choose the right metrics is that measurement and analysis are valuable in large part because they yield insights that may change the way communicators and their companies behave.

“So many of us,” Meakin says, “tend to think of measurement as something you do only at the end” of a campaign. “Certainly, it’s important to measure what’s happened” at the end of a campaign, Meakin concedes. “But the next question has to be, ‘What can we learn [from the data] for the next time? How can we iterate for the next time we do this?’ What we should be doing is making measuring more prescriptive and less descriptive.”

Promoting a Measurement Culture

In fact, Meakin believes one way to promote a measurement culture is to encourage PR pros to start asking “the right questions” during the planning stage of an effort. “You can’t separate measurement from planning,” he argues.

Too many PR pros, of course, continue to measure success according to the thickness of “their news clips book.”

Instead, a better question to ask at the outset of a media relations effort, for example, is, What does the media landscape look like? Which media platforms are our customers frequenting? How can PR’s activities help the company in its effort to grow revenue?

“I encourage people to think about what matters most to your organization or the client’s organization. Then start thinking about designing programs that move the needle against those things and how you can measure them.”

The Toughest Measurement Issue

It sounds relatively straight forward: tie media results to business outcomes. Yet that’s “one of the biggest pitfalls in PR measurement,” says Intrado Digital Media president Ben Chodor.

For example, he cites a company that places a page-one article in the New York Times, “a PR win in anyone’s book,” he says.

“But I challenge PR pros to look more closely at what happened afterthe coverage. Did audiences and influencers share the article broadly? Was there an increase in product orders? Did web traffic spike?”

The gap between PR results and their impact on a business “is probably the most overlooked metric in the industry today,” Chodor believes.

One of the reasons, he says, is because such tracking “requires alignment with marketing data that communications professionals may not have access to or may not be used to analyzing and reporting against.”

Cumulative Effect

Another issue that plays into this example, adds Meakin, is that purchasing is “a cumulative thing…most people don’t make a buying decision after reading one article.”

The page-one article is fantastic, but “there are several touchpoints [in a buying decision]...Are you reaching potential buyers with marketing? Are you publishing content on social media that your audience is going to see? You have to try to measure where that page-one article figures into the mix of all things you did during the course of a year. That’s a fool’s errand.”

That’s not to say you can’t measure the influence of the article. You could conduct audience research and see how/if your target audience has changed its opinion based on media placements. You could also track traffic back to your web site, particularly if the article had a link.

Another example from Chodor helps demonstrate finding the right metrics for ROI.

Let’s assume Technology Company A is an early-stage start-up, Chodor says. It is entering a crowded and highly competitive market. The company has tasked PR to launch its brand, raise visibility and position its executives as thought leaders in the industry.

For most PR pros, one of the first metrics that might come to mind in this example would be quantity of coverage over a specific period of time, such as three months or six months.

In addition, communicators might look at metrics surrounding the quality of articles or other published content, says Chodor.

For example, where were the media placements published? Were they in top-tier publications or trade publications? You could get more granular and ask, were they toward the front of the publication or buried? Did the coverage accurately reflect the company’s narrative? Were top executives quoted?

While those metrics are useful and deserve analysis, for a start-up, quantity and quality of coverage tell only part of the story.

Finding the Right Metrics

“These metrics are unlikely to demonstrate true ROI against business outcomes,” Chodor says. In short, these metrics will fail to demonstrate true market impact.

Instead, Chodor recommends the company look at metrics surrounding: web site traffic, followers of the company’s social channels, social mentions, lead generation, content downloads and inbound sales inquiries.

Says Chodor, “It’s important to remember that PR can be a dotted line to the metrics listed above.” In addition, he notes a strong PR campaign contributes to “overall brand lift and should help feed the marketing/sales funnel.”

Other softer metrics for PR can include an analysis of: PR coverage alignment with company/product messaging and value proposition, share of voice (in this case, the company would want to see incremental increases over time vs. share of voice domination immediately, feature coverage vs. mentions of the company, type of coverage).

A combination of the qualitative and quantitative metrics listed here “will paint a pretty clear picture of PR performance and ROI,” Chodor says.