What are the best media pitching metrics to track?

The ideal numbers to report are the ones that show your pitching’s impact on the organization’s bottom line. But those often require sophisticated analytics and CRM software and are out of reach of all but a few PR pros.

Short of that, sometimes you can identify correlations between your placements and impacts such as increased web traffic or other measurements of audience interest.

Until you get to those levels, try adding some of these categories to your coverage reports to add depth and nuance. The ambitious PR pros I know appreciate having additional criteria to push them to make their media outreach ever more meaningful to their employers.

Headline mention?

First paragraph mention?

Image/video included?

Backlink?

Recommendation?

Quoted? Which spokesperson?

Which message(s) were included?

Which key audiences does the outlet reach?

Customers included? Which ones?

Competitors included? Which ones?

All these are objective metrics. You can also make a subjective evaluation of the placement’s tone and record “positive, negative or neutral.”

We discussed these metrics, and how to assemble them into a weighted scorecard with a point system, on last week’s Smart PR Inner Circle training event. I shared examples of weighted scorecards and coverage reports from agencies and companies of various sizes. And we also tackled some formulas and equations for tying coverage to financial results. If you’d like to find out more about accessing training like this, check this out.