How to measure PR success: a practical guide for SMEs

For a small or medium-sized business, public relations can seem difficult to measure.

A sales team can count new orders. An advertising platform can report clicks and conversions. PR often works across a longer and less direct journey. A potential customer might read about a company in the news, notice its name again on LinkedIn and search for it several weeks later. They may not make an enquiry until months after the original article appeared.

This does not mean PR cannot be measured. It means businesses need to measure the right things.

Counting press cuttings is not enough. Successful PR should improve how visible, trusted and memorable a business is. It should also support a clear organisational goal, such as generating leads, attracting employees, increasing sales or entering a new market.

This guide follows the principles set out in AMEC’s PR Professionals’ Definitive Guide to Measurement and its free Integrated Evaluation Framework. These resources encourage organisations to make measurement part of everyday PR work and to look beyond activity towards meaningful outcomes and business impact.

Start with a measurable objective

Good PR measurement begins before a campaign starts.

First, decide what the organisation wants to achieve. This could be:

• Increasing awareness in a new market
• Building trust among potential customers
• Supporting a product launch
• Generating qualified sales leads
• Attracting investors or employees
• Improving the company’s reputation
• Becoming known as an expert in its sector
• Increasing visibility in search engines and AI-generated answers

The next step is to create a communication objective that supports that organisational objective.

For example, “raise brand awareness” is a useful goal, but it is not yet a measurable objective. A clearer objective would be: “Increase awareness among UK technology decision-makers from 15% to 25% within 12 months.”

AMEC recommends setting benchmarks, KPIs and targets at the planning stage. This gives the business a clear definition of success. It also prevents teams from choosing impressive-looking figures after a campaign has finished.

An effective PR strategy should therefore explain what the campaign needs to change, who it needs to reach and how progress will be assessed.

Use the AMEC measurement journey

The AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework provides a clear journey from business objectives to organisational impact. It can be used by organisations of any size and with any level of budget.

The main stages are:

1. Objectives: What does the organisation need to achieve, and how can communication support it?
2. Inputs: Who is the target audience, what insight is available, and what time, budget and resources will be needed?
3. Activities: What communication work will take place?
4. Outputs: What content, coverage or other material was produced and distributed?
5. Out-takes: How did the audience respond? Did people pay attention, understand, remember or engage?
6. Outcomes: Did awareness, trust, preference, behaviour or intention change?
7. Impact: Did the activity contribute to an organisational result, such as increased sales, stronger relationships or an improved reputation?

This structure helps SMEs avoid a common mistake: treating activity as a result.

Sending 50 pitches is activity. Securing five relevant articles is an output. More people remembering the brand is an out-take or outcome. An increase in qualified enquiries is a business impact.

All of these measures can be useful, but they answer different questions.

Choose PR KPIs that match the objective

Many PR tools produce large amounts of data. That does not mean every number belongs in a report.

A useful SME dashboard may only need eight to 12 KPIs. These should provide a balanced picture of activity, outputs, audience response, outcomes and impact.

Possible KPIs include:

• Number of quality media articles
• Percentage of coverage in priority publications
• Inclusion of key brand messages
• Spokesperson quotes
• Positive, neutral and negative sentiment
• Branded search volume
• Website referral traffic
• Engaged visits
• Downloads or registrations
• PR-influenced enquiries
• Share of voice
• AI citations or mentions
• Changes in awareness, trust or consideration

Avoid reporting a metric simply because it is available. Every KPI should help answer a question or guide a decision.

Measure the quality of media coverage

The total number of articles is easy to count, but it can be misleading. Twenty weak mentions are not necessarily better than two detailed features in publications trusted by the target audience.

Each piece of coverage can be assessed using a simple quality checklist:

• Is the publication relevant to the target audience?
• Is the company named in the headline or opening paragraphs?
• Is the company the main subject of the story?
• Does the article contain a priority brand message?
• Is a spokesperson quoted?
• Is the tone positive, neutral or negative?
• Does the article include a link to the company’s website?
• Is the content likely to remain useful and searchable?
• Does it include a clear next step for an interested reader?

An SME could give each article a quality score from one to five. A detailed feature in an influential trade title might score five, while a brief mention on a low-relevance website might score one.

This creates a more useful picture than counting every mention as equal.

Strong media relations should focus on reaching the right people in places they already know and trust.

Do not use advertising value equivalents

Advertising value equivalent, usually shortened to AVE, attempts to calculate what a piece of editorial coverage would have cost as advertising.

AMEC’s measurement guidance rejects AVEs as a meaningful way to prove PR value. Advertising and editorial coverage are different forms of communication. Multiplying an advertising rate by an invented “credibility factor” does not show whether anybody noticed, understood or acted on a story.

Instead of placing an artificial cash value on coverage, businesses should examine its relevance, quality, audience response and contribution to organisational objectives.

Track brand awareness

Brand awareness measures whether more people know that a business exists.

Useful indicators can include:

• Searches for the company or product name
• Direct website traffic
• Social media mentions
• Relevant follower growth
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Event registrations
• Survey results
• The number of people who recognise or recall the brand

Google Search Console and Google Trends can help show whether branded searches are rising. Social listening tools can track public conversations. Surveys can provide more direct evidence of whether awareness has changed.

SMEs do not always need an expensive national study. A short quarterly survey of customers, prospects or event attendees can create a useful benchmark. The questions and audience should remain consistent so that results can be compared over time.

Awareness should not be confused with reach. Estimated reach shows how many people might have had the opportunity to see something. It does not prove that they noticed or remembered it.

Connect PR with website behaviour

Digital analytics can help show what people do after reading or hearing about a company.

Google Analytics 4 can report visits from links in online coverage. Businesses should consider tracking:

• Referral traffic from media websites
• Visits to campaign landing pages
• Engaged sessions
• Time spent on key pages
• Downloads and video views
• Newsletter registrations
• Contact-form completions
• Assisted conversions

Referral traffic is useful, but it does not show the full effect of PR. Some publications do not provide links. People may also read an article on one device and later visit the website directly from another.

Businesses should therefore look for changes in direct traffic and branded search around important coverage. This does not prove that PR caused every visit, but it can reveal a credible pattern.

Companies using digital PR and SEO PR should also measure backlink quality, organic search visibility, keyword rankings and traffic to important service pages.

Measure leads, not just clicks

Website visits only become commercially useful when the right visitors take action.

A PR report can show how many people:

• Submitted an enquiry
• Requested a demonstration
• Downloaded a guide
• Joined a mailing list
• Called the business
• Started a free trial
• Applied for a job
• Made a purchase

UTM links can help identify traffic from specific campaigns. Contact forms can ask, “How did you hear about us?” Sales teams can record whether a prospect mentions an article, interview, podcast or event.

PR attribution will rarely be perfect. A customer may interact with several marketing and sales channels before making a decision. It is more credible to explain how PR contributed to a result than to claim it was the only cause.

For firms using B2B and corporate PR, the buying cycle may last several months. These companies should record PR-influenced opportunities as well as immediate enquiries.

Monitor reputation and trust

Reputation is what people think and feel about an organisation. It affects whether customers trust it, whether employees want to join and whether partners are willing to work with it.

Reputation metrics can include:

• The tone of media coverage
• Positive and negative social comments
• Review scores
• Customer sentiment
• Trust and recommendation survey results
• Use of priority messages
• Spokesperson credibility
• The number and type of complaints
• Stakeholder feedback
• Changes in purchase preference

Automated sentiment tools can help process large amounts of data, but they can misunderstand humour, technical language and mixed opinions. Important coverage should also be checked by a person.

Reputation should be examined by topic. A company could be seen as innovative but expensive, or reliable but old-fashioned. One overall sentiment score may hide these useful differences.

Calculate share of voice

Share of voice shows how much visibility a brand has compared with selected competitors.

A simple calculation is:

Brand mentions ÷ total mentions for all measured brands × 100

If a company receives 20 relevant media mentions and the selected group of companies receives 100 mentions in total, the company has a 20% share of voice.

Businesses can also calculate share of voice using:

• Quality-weighted coverage
• Spokesperson quotes
• Social conversations
• Search visibility
• Backlinks
• Coverage linked to a priority topic
• AI-generated answers

A quality-weighted measure is usually more informative than a simple mention count. Coverage in a top-priority publication might receive five points, while a passing mention receives one.

The competitor group should be chosen carefully and kept consistent. Comparing against different businesses each month makes the trend unreliable.

Sector context also matters. A technology PR campaign will use different publications, competitors and messages from a campaign for professional services firms.

Compare share of voice with share of market

Share of voice and share of market are related, but they measure different things.

Share of voice measures visibility or attention. Share of market measures a company’s proportion of revenue, sales, customers or users in a defined market.

An SME with 5% market share but 15% share of voice may be gaining attention faster than its current commercial position would suggest. This can be a positive sign during a launch or period of growth.

However, market share is affected by price, products, customer service, distribution, competition and wider economic conditions. PR should not receive all the credit when market share rises, or all the blame when it falls.

The useful question is whether stronger visibility is followed by improvements in awareness, consideration, enquiries and commercial performance.

Include GEO in PR measurement

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the work of improving a brand’s visibility in answers produced by AI tools and AI-powered search.

As more people use AI to research suppliers, compare services and understand markets, SMEs need to know whether their brand appears in these answers.

GEO metrics can include:

• How often the brand appears for a fixed set of questions
• How prominently it appears
• Whether the brand is cited as a source
• Which website pages or media articles are cited
• Whether the description of the business is accurate
• How visibility compares with competitors
• Visits from AI and conversational search platforms
• Enquiries connected with those visits

Create a list of 20 to 50 questions that potential customers are likely to ask. Test the same questions regularly and record the answers, citations and competitors mentioned.

AI results can vary between tests, so one answer should not be treated as a firm ranking. Look for patterns over time.

Earned media coverage, expert commentary, clear website content and authoritative backlinks can all help establish a company as a credible source. This can be particularly useful for a start-up PR campaign, where the business is building authority from a low starting point.

Use the right measurement tools

An SME can build a useful measurement system with a mixture of free and paid tools.

Google Analytics 4 can measure website behaviour and conversions. Google Search Console reports search visibility and queries. Looker Studio can combine several data sources in one dashboard.

Media monitoring tools such as Cision, Meltwater, Muck Rack or Roxhill can help find coverage. Brandwatch, Talkwalker and Mention support social listening. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz can measure backlinks and search performance.

A customer relationship management system can connect enquiries with later sales. Survey tools can measure awareness, understanding, trust and consideration.

The best tool is not always the most expensive. It is the one that provides reliable information that the business will use.

AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework is free to use and can help businesses organise this information into a consistent measurement journey.

Build a simple PR dashboard

A monthly dashboard for an SME might look like this:

The final column is essential. A dashboard should explain what the figures mean and what the business will do next.

If a story generates strong traffic but few enquiries, the landing page may need improvement. If a trade publication produces high-quality leads, similar opportunities should receive more attention. If coverage volume rises but message inclusion falls, future pitching and spokesperson briefing may need to be sharper.

Measure progress, then act on it

Good PR measurement is not about finding one number that proves return on investment. It is about building a credible chain of evidence.

As the AMEC guide to PR measurement makes clear, measurement should be an everyday part of PR rather than an exercise completed at the end of a campaign.

The strongest reports show:

• What the organisation wanted to achieve
• Who it needed to reach
• What communication activity took place
• What outputs were produced
• How the audience responded
• What changed as a result
• How this contributed to organisational impact

SMEs should establish a baseline before starting, set realistic targets and review progress regularly. Reports should also note outside factors, such as advertising, product changes, economic conditions or competitor activity, that may have affected the result.

Most importantly, measurement should lead to action. A report has little value if it is filed away and forgotten.

PR success is not simply being mentioned more often. It is being seen by the right people, in the right places, with the right message – and turning that attention into greater awareness, trust and business performance.

Hendrix Rose PR helps ambitious SMEs build measurement into their communications from the start. Explore our PR measurement service, view our full range of PR and communication services, or learn more about the sectors we support.