How to tell whether a PR coverage report was actually useful.
A coverage report earns its keep when it shows the work solved the problem you agreed on at the start of the engagement. Read it in the order below and you will know within a few minutes whether yours does.
By Michaela Villaroman · Published
Read the objective before you read the report.
PR is hard to price against one fixed value, because coverage can support very different business goals. For one client the useful result is credibility. For another it is awareness.
For a third it is one placement in one publication that a particular buyer, investor or partner already reads. Judge the report against the goal that was agreed before any pitching happened, not against the length of the list.
AMEC, the international body for communications measurement, puts this first for the same reason. Its Barcelona Principles 3.0 begin by calling measurable goals a prerequisite to planning and evaluation, and its planning guidance asks you to define the business result you want before the activity starts. If nobody wrote the objective down at the beginning, the report has nothing to be measured against, and that is the thing to fix before the next month of work.
Check the placements against the audience the brief named.
Go through the list article by article. Which publication carried it, which desk, is the link live, and is the message the one you signed off on. Then check whether it reached the audience the brief named.
Two very different reports can both be correct. If the brief was one priority publication, one article in it is the result, and a longer list elsewhere is not a substitute. A new product that needed to be known about is the opposite case: several outlets covering it is the point, and a single placement leaves the job unfinished.
The shape of a good report is set by the brief, so a report that would look identical for any client is not telling you much.
Coverage, audience response and business results are not the same measurement.
AMEC separates them. Its framework asks that measurement identify outputs, outcomes and potential impact, which is Principle 2 of the Barcelona Principles.
Placements and article counts are outputs. What audiences took away, thought or did afterwards sits in outcomes. What that changed for the organisation sits in impact.
Most coverage reports, including monthly ones, are output reports. There is nothing wrong with that as long as everyone reading it knows that is what it is. The problem starts when an output is presented as an outcome.
A placement in a business daily is evidence the story ran and reached that publication's readership. It is not evidence that anyone bought anything, and no agency can hand you a report that proves it did.
Audience estimates and AVE are context, with limits worth saying out loud.
Advertising value equivalency is usually sold to you like this: if you had not hired me, you would have paid this much for the same space in advertising. My honest view is that it is an overinflated number. It goes up because the publications are big, not because the work moved the business.
AMEC states it flatly as Principle 5: AVEs are not the value of communication.
Audience figures need the same handling. They are publication-level estimates. They describe the reach of an outlet, they can overlap between outlets, and they are not verified readers of your article.
MVR reports both figures where a client wants them and labels what they are, which is why the Workmate acquisition case study carries a note explaining how to read its placement count and estimated ad value. Use them as scale and context. Do not convert them into revenue or return on investment, and be careful of anyone who does it for you.
A report is finished when it points to a decision.
By the last page you should be able to pick one of four things.
- Continue. The work is reaching the audience you agreed on and the objective is still the right one.
- Refine. The objective holds, but the story or the channel needs adjusting for the next round.
- Change the next move. What the report shows about your market or your positioning makes a different announcement the better one to work on.
- Stop. PR is not the right investment for this particular goal right now.
That last one is a real option and it should stay on the table. I use discovery calls to work out whether PR can support the business goal at all, and if it cannot, I would rather say so and recommend the money goes into something that moves the business forward. A report that quietly avoids that conversation for another quarter is not doing its job.
Ask your agency what the report was measured against.
Three requests make any report readable: the objective the work was measured against, who each placement was meant to reach, and a plain label on every estimated figure saying what it does and does not measure. Any agency should be able to give you all three without a discussion.
To see how MVR handles the reporting side, media relations sets out what we send back after outreach, and the case studies each list the placements they earned with links to the published articles. If you are weighing up a first engagement, tell us what you are trying to achieve and we will tell you whether PR is the way to get there.
Sources: AMEC, the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, Barcelona Principles 3.0 (PDF), for setting measurable goals as a prerequisite to planning, measurement and evaluation; for measurement identifying outputs, outcomes and potential impact; and for AVEs not being the value of communication. AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework planning guidance, for defining the business result and the audience before the activity begins. Everything describing how MVR works, and the view on AVE, comes from Michaela Villaroman and this site.