Contrary to popular belief, PRs can and should play a major role in tracking commercial outcomes. As communication leads, PR agencies have as much a right to take a lead on commercial measurement as a digital agency which is managing a PPC account.

Why?

1. Brand awareness generates sales and outcomes and can be tracked
2. Non-branded search visibility generates leads and sales, and links have value
3. PPC campaigns often bid on branded keywords, the volume from which is driven by PR
4. Referral traffic generates traffic and often sales
5. Affiliate campaigns often track skim links from media sources, such as the Telegraph or Daily Mail
6. Building reputation, both on and offline, improves click through rates (and bad reputations dramatically reduce CTRs).

But how can we track commercial outcomes? Isn’t it just too difficult?

If we all accept that PR drives commercial outcomes, then now comes the hard part because, good measurement:

1. is not cheap
2. means more than just measuring top level metrics, such as web traffic
3. can’t happen without a considerable investment in training
4. won’t happen unless your company fosters a culture where analytics drive everything
5. might mean taking your client on a journey, especially if they have closed ideas about what measurement is and isn’t.

Measurement can be low cost and reasonably accurate or very accurate but very expensive. While some clients aren’t prepared to pay huge fees, we are finding more and more clients are bought into measurement and data than ever before.

The AMEC framework has provided the structure to make measurement possible on the smallest of budgets. Its approach and the framework’s lexicon have now been absorbed into our own measurement methodology.

Off the shelf tools that promise to solve your measurement woes are not yet at a point where they are a complete solution. To do measurement properly involves rolling your sleeves up and getting dirty in analytics, data studio, MySQL databases and doing your own research. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, which is why the framework should be your guide.

Some clients simply want to look for correlations from PR outputs to commercial outcomes, while others want full clarity on attribution. The latter is complex and expensive but definitely possible. Attribution is a data science and requires considerable skill, but we’ve found investing in the process has helped us win and retain clients.

My recommendations for any PR person at the start of this journey are:

1. training: train your account teams on analytics. A separate analytics team will not be the answer
2. culture and values: make measurement central to your mission. If it isn’t then measurement will remain an add on
3. create a champion: while a separate analytics team is not in my view the answer, I certainly recommend investing in people who understand data and analytics. Kind of an advisory board for practitioners
4. Don’t claim to know all the answers. More often than not, measurement asks more questions than it gives answers. Go on the journey.

For measurement month, we have packaged up our measurement offerings. We now have three products that are available to clients – OneEval Commercial, OneEval Reputation and OneEval Brand. You can find out about them all here. Each product is used by our clients to quantify the impact of our PR, or their company performance to date. Or both.

Building up this expertise and launching these products has taken the best part of eight years to refine. However, they now take centre stage with clients and we are at the top table when it comes to conversations about the commercial impact of PR.

How these tools work is complicated, and I don’t want this post to become a sales pitch, but what I would say is that I am open to mentor clients or even other agencies on the subject of measurement. My door is open. I like to share.

James Crawford is the managing director and founder of PR Agency One. He’s been a major champion of measurement for over a decade.