You Ask, I Answer: Impressions as a PR Measurement?

In today's episode, Meredith asks, what are the current industry thoughts on using impressions as a metric to measure PR? Uh impressions are kind of like um followers on Twitter, right? Or website traffic. They're a good leading indicator at the top of the funnel. Because if you have zero, then nothing else can happen, right?

Uh if if you have zero visitors on your website, guess what? All the stuff down funnel doesn't matter because you have zero traffic, right? If you have zero followers on Twitter, it's going to be real hard to demonstrate any other value because it's zero. So if your PR efforts are zero, right, you've got no impressions whatsoever, you're not going to generate any other results. Um at the very least, they are a leading indicator that can hint towards the performance of other things.

However, the challenge with public relations metrics in general is that they are all inherently top of funnel metrics for the most part. They do have impact uh throughout the funnel, but PR's primary remit is at the top of the funnel to generate awareness, to generate trust, uh, to generate interest. And so impressions are a starting point. What you want to be able to do though is take a look at impressions and things and run mathematical analysis of something called multiple regression analysis to see does the impressions that you create, do they have a mathematical relationship, a provable correlation to something further down the funnel, like leads generated or shopping carts started, etc. If you run that analysis, and it's a fairly sophisticated mathematical analysis, but if you run that analysis and say, yeah, there's there's no relationship between the you know impressions and form fills, then you know that your PR isn't working, right?

Or that that metric certainly is is not valid at the very least. But again, it's one of those things where if you've got no impressions, you're not going to get much of anything else from PR. Um, but it it has to be used as part of an overall measurement strategy that that looks at all the PR metrics you have and then looks at the outcome that stakeholders care about, like something that has direct line of sight to revenue, and then say, what is the mathematical relationship between these PR numbers and that outcome that that means dollars in the bank. Should you rely on impressions if you have nothing else? No.

At the very least, I would blend it with another set of metrics that you can get hold of. Something like branded organic search, which is the number of times people search for your products or services or company or stakeholders by name, right? Um if you are creating lots of impressions in your coverage, but still nobody thinks to Google for you, you've probably done something wrong. You're getting press or coverage for things that don't matter that doesn't remind people. Ah, I every time I hear the the I see trust insights in a blog post about analytics, they're the company to call about analytics.

I should call them. And the next time that you have an analytics problem, you go into Google and you Google and you say, uh, oh, who's that company? Oh, yeah, Trust Insights. You Google for trust insights, right? In that that's an example of how PR would create mind share, and that mind share translates into branded organic search, uh, which then presumably leads to website visitors, engagements, form fills, and so on and so forth.

So, impressions should never be the outcome of a campaign, they should never be the final result on which you hang your hat, but they can be part of the measurement package, ultimately showing the various different PR metrics and how they correlate to results that stakeholders care about. So that's that's how I would tackle that particular question. It's a very good question. It is a challenging question. Um the outcomes and effects of public relations are they are measurable, they are trackable, they are something that you can look at and understand the value of public relations, but to do so requires a lot of math, and that's not always something that that folks who got into PR to you know to enjoy doing, right?

Well, a decent number of folks got into PR because they didn't want to be doing a whole lot of math, but to prove the value that involves a lot of of math. So, good question. Get ready to do some math. Thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.