2 Ways to Measure Public Relations ROI

For decades, public relations pros have been racking their brains to prove the value of PR through hard data. In today’s digital world, it’s easier than ever to demonstrate how PR moves the needle for businesses in all industries.

Beyond the benefits of traditional earned media, the digital aspect of everything we do not only helps us reach more niche audiences, it builds valuable web authority and SEO. PR provides backlinks to your content, and content published on outside websites shows search engines your company has valuable expertise.

Here are two ways to measure the digital ROI of your latest PR efforts:

Web Traffic Referrals

Whether you’ve published a contributed article on a trade industry website or distributed a press release for a new product announcement, you have the opportunity to drive qualified traffic to your website. While PR is top of the funnel content, the online traffic it generates can consist of marketing-qualified leads (MQL).

Including links back to your owned content that takes a deeper dive drives MQLs down the buyers’ journey, which is trackable through Google or Adobe Analytics. These leads can even be captured through gated content and developed into sales-qualified leads (SQL).

Keyword Rankings

At Element, we use a program called gShift to track the ranking of earned content published on external websites. After we publish content for our clients, we immediately begin tracking the ranking of that content for keywords their audience is searching.

We’ve seen earned content rank first on page one of Google for key search terms. When this happens, it confirms that you are working with authoritative websites and the audience is deeming your content as valuable.