Glasgow Business . 43 Glasgow Business . 3
www.glasgowchamberofcommerce.com BIG TALKS Laura Berry, Senior Account Manager, The BIG Partnership
Death knell for AVE? T
For a meaningful measure of your campaign’s success, reach for the Rs
raditionally, Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) has been used as a measure of PR success evaluation. AVE offers up a crude measure of return on investment, in a ‘here’s what you could have spent on
advertising’ kind of way, but the fact is it doesn’t offer much in the way of showcasing real PR value.
One thing I’ve discovered on my
PR travels is that real evaluation takes time and effort – but get it right and it’s worth it. It must be determined by the
values and objectives of the client, and PR activity has to align itself as closely as possible to these objectives. So with AVE off the table, let’s
look instead at the four ‘R’s of measurement:
Reach
Useful for measuring awareness, and includes organics and viral reach, column inches, social media posts and follows etc. Combined with a series of other KPIs, it can help paint a picture of PR success.
Response
How has your target audience responded to PR outputs? Have they shared or liked social content? Clicked on a trackable link? Visited your website? Here’s where the use of Google Analytics in evaluation starts to come into play. By using some of its basic features, such as web views and traffic referrals, you can start to understand how your campaign outakes influence audience behaviour.
Resonance
Goes deeper than a simple response, but shows a motivation to complete a specific call to action. Tis could be a retweet, download or subscription to a newsleter. Retweets show a stronger action
than a simple like, as they suggest someone is prepared to align their own content with yours and can be used to showcase engagement and sentiment.
Returns
Tis is where the real meaningful measurement lies, where we demonstrate how campaigns fulfil objectives. Consider how to show return on investment, lead generation, sales increases and financial indicators. Again Google Analytics works well, as you can use it to determine data capture, sales hits and goal completion. Important to note here that these leads and sales must be followed up on and PRs can work with clients to create strategic plans to ensure this happens. Not all of the KPIs here will be applicable to
every single campaign, and it’s important to remember to select those which allow you to measure your objectives most effectively. Remember to focus on the objectives rather
than the media throughout – fulfilling the objectives is the overall outcome of the campaign and media relations is simply one of many channels which can be used to do so. Understand the relationship between outakes (the physical by-products of your campaign, coverage, web views, and social shares) and outcomes (directly linked to organisational strategy and business outcomes) and ensure both are tracked as part of your campaign. Use Google
Analytics to
showcase the value of your campaign. Can you show a direct correlation between increase in web traffic and coverage hits? Did your social media content generate an increased number of referrals? Used together,
the four ‘R’s will give you a realistic measure of campaign success.
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