We can all agree that measurement and analytics are essential to proving the value of PR and communications efforts. And once you do this, it can be the key to senior leaders unlocking the vault and allocating more funds to PR in the future. But that in-itself is the issue. PR teams often need money to measure their efforts, money they don’t have though until they measure their efforts, showing their impact to senior leadership. It is a viscous and frustrating cycle, I know.

And much of the budget that PR teams do have, needs to go to content development, programming, influencer partnerships, etc. to actually have something worthwhile to measure. It often leaves little money to devote to measurement- and the team misses out on actionable insights while the program is running.

None of this is ideal BUT I’m here to tell you that it is okay. It may not always seem like it but there are ways to measure effectively without breaking the bank. Here are FIVE tips for measuring on a shoestring budget:

1. Don’t try to boil the ocean

You can’t measure everything perfectly overnight, and you don’t have to. Focus instead on just measuring what matters to your department/company. To effectively do this, setting clear goals and KPIs ahead of a campaign is critical. Senior leadership should be aligned with your goals and KPIs prior to a campaign beginning so that there are no surprise expectations to measure more than you planned. Then you just need to focus on measuring the metrics that matter most to meeting your goals.

Once this is underway, you can start to make incremental shifts toward more advanced measurement over time, showcasing PR’s deeper impact on the company’s bottom line. Remember, measurement is a journey, not an end – meaning you refine and advance as you go.

2. Leverage what is free

These days there are free services available to pull a lot of valuable metrics, such as:

• Google Trends – It provides free search data over time and regions. With this, you can showcase how an uplift in search of your company/brand correlates to a PR campaign. You can also understand what other terms and topics your audience is searching for to optimize your programming and content in the future.
• Owned channel analytics – There are a ton of quality metrics behind your owned social channels. Twitter analytics provides tweet level data over time, including engagement metrics so you can see how PR campaign posts are performing in real time. With Google Analytics set up, you can analyze basic web user behavior, such as time spent on site, pages viewed, referral traffic, etc.

3. Take advantage of omnibus surveys

An omnibus survey is a shared-cost survey that many panels provide, and it is a great way to save money on survey research. You essentially pay a discounted rate to place questions into a survey that is shared with other companies and brands. The methodology is sound – reaching a representative, weighted sample of the general population. These days there are omnibus surveys running in multiple countries, reaching targeted audiences. For little investment, you can measure audience perceptions and brand reputation and have results in days.

4. Invest in ONE AI-driven tool

 If you invest in one media measurement tool, you can save time and resources in the long run. Over the last few years, there have been great advancements in making AI-driven tools more user-friendly, accurate, reliable and efficient. While no tool is perfect, tools today leverage web crawling technology that scrapes the internet for comprehensive media tracking of online news and certain social channels. You can integrate external data to have everything in one, easy-to-use dashboard. And with the use of intelligent query services, you can now set up smarter tags and queries allowing for better measurement of media quality without sacrificing tons of human resources reading and coding everything manually.

5. Up-skill your staff

Many PR professionals claim they aren’t measurement or numbers people, so measurement often gets completely outsourced, which can get costly. With some training and counsel that many vendors offer, your team can learn how to more smartly measure the impact of communications themselves.

So, even on a shoestring budget, you can measure communications efforts to show impact and optimization.

By Marni Zapakin, Vice President, Ketchum Analytics