What an honest PR report should show you

Anyone who pays for PR asks it eventually: what was all that coverage worth? The honest answer is that press coverage does not reduce neatly to one figure. Under pressure, some teams produce one anyway. Knowing how such figures are built, and what better looks like, helps you judge the work, whoever does it.

Ad value equivalent is a proxy, and should say so

Ad value equivalent, or AVE, measures the space a piece of coverage took up and prices it as though it had been bought as advertising. Its flaws are well known. Earned coverage and paid space are not the same thing, and a multiplier applied to bridge the difference is a choice somebody made, not a fact.

None of that makes AVE worthless. It makes it a proxy, and a proxy is fine as long as it carries the label. The real problem is a figure whose workings nobody in the meeting can explain.

Ask where a number came from. If the answer takes a sentence, you are being given a report. If it takes a paragraph, you are hearing a defence.

The method should stay put

Whatever multipliers and rates are used, they should belong to the team doing the reporting, be written down, and stay the same from month to month. A figure that climbs because the method changed is worse than no figure, because it looks like progress when it is not.

Keeping them in one place also means that when they are revised, earlier months can be restated on the same basis, instead of showing a jump nobody can interpret.

Evidence has to be captured on the day

Online articles are edited, moved behind paywalls and taken down. A link saved in March may prove nothing by June, and rebuilding a whole quarter's coverage at reporting time is where PR reporting most often falls apart.

A screenshot taken the day a piece appears, and filed with the record, costs almost nothing. It is the difference between a report and a list of dead links, and it is the only copy that shows what the article said before anyone amended it. If your reports arrive as bare links, ask for the captures.

Measure what the PR was for

The number of pieces is the easiest thing to count and the least useful thing to report. Thirty articles in outlets your target market never reads make a worse month than three in the right ones. A useful report covers:

• Which outlets carried the story, and whether they were the ones you were aiming for.
• Whether your message came through, quoted or paraphrased, or whether the piece drifted onto a different subject.
• Share of voice against named competitors, where that is the objective.
• How visible your spokesperson was, if the brief was to build a profile rather than promote a product.
• The pieces that did not run, and why, since they shape the next pitch more than the ones that did.

Set coverage beside the numbers you already watch

PR rarely owns a sale, but it often moves alongside figures a business already follows: branded search volume, direct traffic, enquiries that mention an article. None of these proves cause and effect, and no report should claim that it does.

Plotting coverage against those figures on one timeline, and stating plainly that it shows correlation, is more persuasive than a manufactured headline number. It also invites you to bring your own data, so reporting becomes shared work rather than something to defend.

Candour is the real credential

When a PR relationship ends over measurement, it is rarely because the numbers were modest. It is usually because the client discovered, unprompted, that a headline figure was softer than it looked. Being told what a number can and cannot support, before you think to ask, is the clearest sign you are working with people you can trust.

If you would like a clearer view of what your coverage is achieving, or a second opinion on how it is being reported to you, talk to us at ALXO.