PR ROI (Public Relations Return on Investment) shows how your public relations efforts are helping your business grow. You can measure it by looking at things like media mentions, website visitors, search engine rankings, and how much your brand stands out compared to others.

Tools like Prowly make it easy to track these results, link them to your goals, and share clear reports on how well your PR efforts are paying off.

This guide breaks down what PR ROI is, why it’s tricky to measure, and the specific metrics that help you show impact—not guess at it.

What is PR ROI?

PR ROI, or return on investment in public relations, is about more than just money. It shows how your PR work helps build your brand’s reputation, increase awareness, and earn the trust of your audience.

While sales and revenue are important, PR ROI also includes these bigger-picture benefits that help your business grow over time.

Why is it so hard to measure PR ROI?

Measuring PR ROI may seem like a difficult task, but the path from your PR efforts to business results is often long and complex.

PR influences customers via multiple touchpoints over time. So there is no one specific action to follow and measure.

Many valuable outcomes may not be visible in a simple graph, but they make your brand shine none-the-less. Improved brand reputation, increased trust, and greater visibility are more intangible an don’t show clearly in traditional financial metrics. PR teams often also struggle with limited or inaccurate tools that can’t fully capture or connect these diverse impacts to concrete business goals.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

Fortunately, by setting clear objectives, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative metrics, and with the right tools, it’s possible to overcome these challenges.

💡 With Prowly, you can monitor all indicators that reflect how your brand is doing. Mentions, media monitoring (offline and online), and even create, distribute and track press releases. All of the data is collected and displayed in a comprehensive dashboard.

But to really understand the full impact of your PR efforts, it’s important to track the right things. PR influences many areas, from media mentions to online buzz, so focusing on a mix of raw numbers and their quality helps you see the full picture.

Here are the key things to measure to get a clear view of your PR ROI:

What to measure to track PR ROI metrics

PR influences many areas. So keep your fingers on the pulse to allocate your budget efficiently. You need to know what works and where.

#1 Website traffic and conversion

Check the number of people who visit your website through your PR stories. This shows whether your coverage is bringing in customers.

It also reflects how your brand resonates with your target.

#2 Media mentions and coverage

Follow the media who mentioned your brand. Verify their credibility and their volume of generated mentions. Plan outreach and responses, both in their feeds and in their emails, especially for those who pull a lot of weight in your industry.

#3 Share of Voice (SoV)

Use Share of Voice to see how much your brand is talked about compared to your competitors. Compare the coverage buzz your brand creates over time.

The bigger the share, the more control you have over your market.

#4 Social media reactions

Your social media presence is one thing, but engagement is another. Track likes, shares, comments, and other interactions with your PR content.

This indicates how well you know your audience and you can refine your strategies of reaching them.

#5 Sentiment and message impact

Pay attention to whether mentions are positive, negative or neutral and track if your key messages are coming through clearly.

Positive coverage that highlights your main points builds trust.

P.S. Want to dive deeper into sentiment analysis and how to use it to strengthen your PR? Check out these articles:

• How to Measure Brand Sentiment in PR - The 2025 Guide
• How to Use Sentiment Analysis in PR? The 2025 Guide
• 20+ Top Sentiment Analysis Tools for PR Pros - a 2025 List

#6 Skip AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent)

AVE tries to put a dollar value on PR by comparing it to ad costs, but it doesn’t show real impact and is considered outdated. There are a lot of other, more accurate indicators (like the above) that reflect your PR efforts more accurately.

Tools like Prowly make it simple to keep track of all these metrics in one place, helping you see how your PR efforts are paying off and making it easier to share your success. All the data is collected in one dashboard where you can analyse it, notice trends, tailor your strategy accordingly, and generate full PR reports.

#7 SEO signals (links and brand searches)

Look at the backlinks your PR generates and whether more people are actively searching for your brand online. Also, track what topics your brand is being associated with—there may be smart opportunities to boost visibility while staying aligned with your messaging and strategy.

Backlinks and branded search volume still play a role in visibility—but in the AI search era, PR-driven signals like brand mentions, trust, and media credibility are becoming even more influential.

SEO matters, but PR is now doing more of the heavy lifting when it comes to how your brand is surfaced, summarized, and recommended in AI-generated results.

Why brand mentions and trust are the new ROI drivers in 2025

As AI-powered search becomes more common, brand mentions and trust are starting to outweigh backlinks in shaping visibility.

Generative engines like ChatGPT and Google Search Generative Experience pull answers from sources they deem credible—not just those with the best SEO.

This means PR-led signals like earned media, sentiment, and consistent messaging now play a bigger role in how your brand is found and trusted.

Tools like Prowly help track those signals—so you can measure PR ROI not just by traffic, but by influence.

Prowly helps you track and grow the exact signals that influence your brand’s presence in generative search:

• Media mentions across top-tier and niche outlets
• Tone and sentiment of your coverage
• Share of Voice against competitors
• Clarity and consistency of your key messages

💡 With Prowly, you're not just tracking traditional PR metrics—you’re building the kind of visibility that AI trusts, ranks, and repeats.

This is why modern PR ROI must account for GEO. It’s no longer just about rankings—it’s about being recognized, cited, and trusted across the sources AI engines pull from.

5 PR metrics that matter most

#1 Media mentions and reach

What is it?
This tracks how many times your brand appears in the news, on blogs, or in other media. It also estimates how many people could have seen those mentions.

Why it matters:
More mentions and a wider reach means your brand is getting noticed, which builds awareness and credibility.

How to track it:
Platforms like Prowly can help you count mentions and estimate audience size for each placement. You can easily set up notifications about new mentions and follow them in real time.

#2 Website traffic and conversions

What is it?
The number of visitors to your website that came from your PR materials in media coverage.

Why it matters:
If people are clicking on your site, it shows your PR is sparking real interest and driving potential customers to learn more.

How to track it:
Use Google Analytics to monitor referral traffic and set up UTMs to see traffic sources.

#3 Share of Voice

What is it?
Share of voice compares how much your brand is talked about in the media compared to your competitors.

Why it matters:
A big share means you are a big player in your niche and allows you to share details over your growth over time.

How to track it:
Media monitoring tools like Prowly can help you see how your coverage stacks up against the competition.

#4 Social media engagement

What is it?
Engagement means likes, shares, comments, and all interactions on social media posts that result from your PR coverage.

Why it matters:
High engagement means your PR stories touch your audience's interests. In other words, they work.

How to track it:
Social media dashboards like Sprout Social make it easy to follow engagement numbers. You can also monitor it manually.

#5 Sentiment and messaging clarity

What is it?
Sentiment analysis checks if your main messages are being communicated and received, and whether your media coverage is positive, neutral or negative.

Why it matters:
Positive coverage and clear messaging help build trust and reinforce your brand’s reputation. If negative mentions arise in numbers, it should be your red flag to react and take some preventive steps to avoid a brewing crisis.

How to track it:
Tools like Prowly analyze sentiment and show if your key messages are being picked up. You can be notified about negative sentiment spikes and monitor active cases to react quickly.

How to calculate PR ROI (a simple formula)

To calculate ROI, use this formula:

PR ROI = (Value of PR Outcomes – PR Costs) / PR Costs

Example:

You spend $2,000 on a PR campaign that brings you $12,000 in measurable value (leads, sales, coverage).

ROI = ($12,000 – $2,000) / $2,000 * 100 = 500%

This means every $1 you invested brought you $5 more.

How to connect PR to business goals? Framework to follow

Linking your PR efforts to business goals is not a piece of cake, but with this framework, it can go more smoothly.

👉 First, define which of the above goals is closer to your needs: raising awareness, encouraging people to learn more, or driving sales.

👉 Then, choose the specific metrics that align with each goal.

This way, you can clearly demonstrate how your PR activities contribute to your company’s success and thus make it easier to track progress and optimize your strategy accordingly. Keep monitoring and tailor it to the shifting market as you go.

What tools help track and report PR ROI?

Combine monitoring, analytics, SEO, and lead-related activities. This way you can cover all the bases and create a multichannel strategy. Thus, your efforts will have even greater impact and your ROI will improve. Prowly connects all these in one intuitive, ready-to-share dashboard.

How to report PR ROI to stakeholders

Measuring PR ROI matters most to stakeholders.

When sharing PR results with stakeholders, keep things simple and focus on impact, not just activities. Instead of listing how many press releases you sent or mentions you got, show how these efforts helped the business, like in boosting brand awareness, increasing website visits, or generating leads.

Use easy-to-understand visuals like charts and graphs to keep them interested. It’s also helpful to show progress over time, so present how it was and how it has changed. Speak in plain language that connects PR results to business goals, drop complicated terms and industry jargon.

To make reporting even easier, tools like Prowly offer features that help you create clear, visual reports that tell the story of your PR success in a way everyone can understand.

FAQ: Your top PR ROI questions and answers

What does PR ROI really mean?

PR ROI is the measurable return you get from public relations, including visibility, traffic, and brand equity.

What are key PR metrics?

Media coverage, web traffic, backlinks, sentiment, and share of voice.

Is PR ROI tied to revenue?

Yes, especially when using analytics and CRM tracking tools to link earned media to lead gen and conversions.

What’s better than AVE?

Actual impact metrics like traffic, backlinks, and quality media placements which can be tracked through platforms like Prowly.

PR ROI - summing up

Smarter PR means making your efforts measurable and data-driven. What once felt intangible, like brand reputation or trust, can now be tracked and quantified with the right numbers in hand.

Today, PR is no longer just about stories and your image; it’s a discipline grounded in clear metrics and real business impact. With modern tools and strategies, you can easily show the impact of your work value.

Does your PR really matter?
With Prowly, it’s easy to keep tabs on media coverage, build reports, and show the real impact of your work. Whether you're getting your name out there or bringing in leads, your PR should speak for itself and shine.

The post How to Measure the ROI of PR (With Metrics That Actually Matter) appeared first on Prowly.

By understanding and tracking brand mentions and PR results, you can clearly see the difference between a thriving brand and one that’s struggling to capture attention.

TL;DR

Brand mentions are any instances where your company is referenced online—often without a backlink. They're key indicators of brand visibility, PR effectiveness, and share of voice. This guide breaks down what brand mentions are, why they matter, and how to track and leverage them to strengthen your PR strategy.

What are brand mentions? (definition & examples)

Brand mentions are cases when a specific brand is mentioned online, discussed, or referred to on any digital platform in various forms of communication. This could be on blogs, social media posts, news articles, or forums, just to name a few.

There are two types of mentions:

• Linked mentions, which include a hyperlink to your website
• Unlinked mentions, which reference your name without a link

Both are valuable for PR and reputation management. Even without links, mentions show that your brand is part of public conversations.

Examples of brand mentions:

• A news article covering your latest product launch
• A podcast host discussing your brand as a category example
• A Reddit post asking for opinions on your company
• A LinkedIn comment where someone tags your brand during an industry debate

Mentions can occur in three different types of sentiments: positive, neutral or negative. They are a key indicator of your brand's presence and reputation in the public sphere.

Why tracking brand mentions matters (for PR strategy & ROI)

For businesses across industries, brand mentions are a thermometer for the health of their brand. Through onlinementions, businesses can monitor their online reputation, their customers' opinions of them, and the effectiveness of their PR strategies.

Tracking brand mentions is the practice of setting up a filter and getting notifications every time someone uses your brand name or designated keywords. It sounds simple, but it's a tool that can super power your PR.

Here’s why tracking mentions matters:

• Understand brand visibility
  See how often your brand is discussed, where it's showing up, who’s talking about it, and how.
• Measure campaign impact
  Mentions help you gauge whether your press releases, announcements, or events are getting attention.
• Monitor reputation and sentiment
  Track the tone of mentions to identify positive buzz—or spot potential PR crises before they snowball.
• Improve media outreach
  Discover which outlets and journalists already cover your brand or topic area.
• Prove PR ROI to stakeholders
  Use mention volume, reach, and Share of Voice (SOV) data to show your team’s value.

Effectively monitoring and responding to brand mentions can enhance your brand image, boost customer engagement, and provide valuable insights into the public perception of your brand.

The different types of brand mentions

There are several different types of brand mentions, depending on the source the mention comes from:

A good brand mentions tool captures all of these mentions and groups them according to source and sentiment.

1. News mentions (earned media)
Articles in online media, industry publications, or local news outlets referencing your brand in coverage.

Example: A product launch mentioned in TechCrunch or a quote from your CEO in a trend piece.

2. Social Media Mentions (shared media)
Comments, posts, or tags on platforms like Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok.

Example: A journalist tweeting a link to your press release or an influencer tagging your product in a post.

3. Blog and forum mentions
Mentions in niche blogs, customer review sites, or forums like Reddit or Quora.

Example: A blogger reviewing your product or users discussing your company in a Reddit thread.

4. Podcast and video mentions
Spoken mentions in audio or video content that reference your brand or product.

Example: A podcast host citing your brand as a case study or a YouTube creator discussing your campaign.

5. Unlinked mentions
Your brand is mentioned without a hyperlink. These are common—and valuable—even without direct SEO benefits.

Example: A journalist references your brand by name but doesn’t link to your site.

6. Reviews and testimonials (customer-driven mentions)

User-generated content on review platforms like Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, G2, Capterra, or TrustRadius. These mentions can reflect satisfaction, dissatisfaction, or comparison with competitors—and they influence buying decisions and brand perception.

Example: A 5-star review on G2 praising your media monitoring features, or a Capterra comment noting ease of use compared to a competitor.

7. Broadcast Mentions (TV, radio, podcasts)

Mentions of your brand in traditional or digital audio/visual media. This includes TV news segments, radio interviews, and podcast discussions. These often require specialized media monitoring tools to detect but can significantly boost brand credibility.

Example: A PR segment on a morning news show featuring your CEO, or a podcast host referencing your brand during an industry conversation.

Pro tip: With Prowly, you can monitor all of these mentions in one place and get real-time alerts whenever and wherever your brand is talked about.

Why brand mentions matter

If you're wondering whether it’s worth the time and budget to monitor brand mentions, the answer is simple: it’s essential for protecting your brand image, building trust, and proving PR value. Here’s how tracking brand mentions across digital and traditional media channels benefits your PR strategy

1️⃣ Reputation management

Brand mentions can be both positive and negative. While many boost your brand reputation, others can damage it—especially if left unaddressed.

Using brand monitoring tools like Prowly, you can track online conversations, including social media posts and reviews, in real time. This helps you manage negative mentions and reinforce positive ones, creating a healthier brand image and public perception.

💡 Tip: If you want to make your PR strategy truly robust, read these articles to learn how to manage and protect your brand reputation.

2️⃣ Customer perception and trust

Brand mentions provide valuable insights into how customers perceive your business—without needing extensive research. By tracking mentions across social media platforms, blogs and review sites, you can better understand trust levels and customer sentiment. 

3️⃣ Social proof

Track mentions that showcase testimonials, quotes, videos, or articles about your brand—this is social proof in action. These organic endorsements shape public trust and influence purchase decisions.

By using brand mention tools, you can automatically dig up this proof and attach it to PR reports with metrics like reach, sentiment, and engagement.

4️⃣ Crisis management

Wondering how to spot a brewing crisis? Set up alerts to monitor brand mentions across the web. A spike in negative mentions or sudden surge in volume on specific social media accounts can signal reputational risks early on.

This allows you to take control of the narrative before the story spirals, protecting your brand reputation.

5️⃣ Competitor analysis

Brand monitoring isn’t just about you. Track how people talk about your competitors—what gets praised, what triggers backlash, and how audiences respond.

Using tools like Prowly, you can follow competitor social media channels, websites, and review platforms to identify patterns and gaps in their PR strategy.

P.S. For those searching for the best tools available for competitor analysis, check out this article.

6️⃣ Monitoring digital & traditional media mentions in one place

Collecting clippings manually is a daunting task, especially since most print media comes out with new issues every single day. That's when a media monitoring solution can take all the work off your hands.

With print monitoring you can:

• Instantly access global and local newspapers, magazines, and journals.
• Track brand mentions, competitors, and industry trends across all outlets.
• Analyze insights using a user-friendly dashboard.
• Ensure comprehensive coverage from diverse sources.
• Evaluate print media investments and campaign ROI with advanced filters.

💡 Want to make the most of your print coverage? Discover how to turn print media monitoring into a powerful part of your PR strategy.

Broadcast monitoring lets you better understand the media landscape by analyzing your media presence across TV, over the Radio, and in podcasts on both local and global scales.

Monitoring broadcasts allows you to:

• Gain comprehensive coverage data
• Track all mentions across the US, Canada, and the UK
• Capture relevant broadcast content for your market
• Get detailed insights on your media presence
• Obtain metrics like estimated reach, publicity value, and sentiment analysis
• Analyze all media sources from a single, unified tool

7️⃣ Industry trends

Brand names are not the only thing you can track with brand mentions software. You can also type in industry categories, product names, new technologies and anything else that comes to mind.

For example, if you want to keep up with the latest news about ChatGPT, you can just track the term and get notified when news and other mentions roll in.

You can also learn all about using social monitoring for PR from The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations.

How to find and track brand mentions (free & pro tools)

Before investing in a dedicated platform, there are manual and free ways to begin brand monitoring. These options can help you start finding brand mentions and understand your brand’s online presence—though they’re limited in scale and insight.

Free & manual methods to find brand mentions

1. Manual search

Start with a basic Google search using your brand name, product names, or spokespersons. Try it in incognito mode and use tools like the Google’s “News” tab to focus on news sites only. You can also use filters to view recent results or limit them by region.

🔻 Limitation: You’ll miss mentions on social media platforms, forums, or in spoken formats like podcasts.

2. Google Alerts

Set up keyword-based alerts to monitor brand mentions from websites and indexed media. You’ll get email updates when those keywords appear.

🔻 Limitation: Doesn’t include social media channels, podcasts, or sentiment indicators.

→ Read more about Google Alerts alternatives in our article "The Best Google Alerts Alternatives for PR Pros."

3. Social media search

Use the built-in search features of social media platforms like Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to manually check for mentions, hashtags, and tags.

🔻 Limitation: No unified view across channels. You’ll miss context, trends, and brand sentiment behind the mentions.

4. Review sites

Check platforms like G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, or TripAdvisor to monitor what customers are saying about your brand. These reviews can reveal both praise and negative mentions, shaping your brand reputation and trust.

🔻 Limitation: No automated alerting or way to track trends over time.

5. Forums & online communities

Search Reddit, Quora, or niche industry forums using Google with the site:operator (e.g., site:reddit.com “your brand”). These online conversations can uncover hidden insights about your audience and competitors.

🔻 Limitation: No sentiment analysis, limited visibility into volume and engagement levels.

Media monitoring tools (with Prowly walkthrough)

As your media presence grows, free methods become unsustainable. Media monitoring tools offer comprehensive, real-time coverage—and Prowly is built to meet your needs end-to-end.

What to look for in Brand Monitoring Tools

Effective brand monitoring tools should help you:

• Monitor brand mentions across all channels: news sites, blogs, podcasts, social media platforms, review sites, and broadcast media
• Detect brand sentiment and flag negative mentions using sentiment analysis
• Set up customized keyword alerts for your brand, competitors, or campaigns
• Consolidate mentions into a unified dashboard for analysis and reporting
• Track trends over time and measure your Share of Voice vs. competitors

Pros: fast, accurate, covers all types of sources: digital media (including social media) and traditional media (print & broadcast), lets you add mentions to PR reports with just a few clicks

Cons: free for seven days only

Tip: Read this full guide on brand monitoring software to choose the right one.

How to track mentions with Prowly

1. Set up your brand monitoring dashboard

Start by heading to your mention tracking dashboard. Enter the brand terms, campaign hashtags, or spokesperson names you want to monitor.

Customize your monitoring by:

• Language and region (e.g., only Japanese-language results)
• Type of media channel (e.g., social media, blogs, TV, forums)
• Choose specific journalists or authors

2. Create smart alerts that fit your workflow

Once your terms are set, configure email notifications to fit your team’s rhythm, like:

• Immediate alerts for spikes or negative sentiment
• Daily or weekly roundups for ongoing coverage and positive mentions
• Scheduled digests (daily, weekly, or custom intervals)

This way, your team never misses a beat—but also doesn’t get flooded.

3. Monitor sentiment & impact across all channels

Get a real-time view of:

• Audience sentiment and tone (positive, neutral, or negative)
• The volume and source of each mention
• What’s trending in customer feedback and user mentions

Use these insights to adjust your marketing strategy, manage your online reputation, and strengthen customer satisfaction.

4. Add print & broadcast mentions to your PR reports

Need to track mentions beyond digital? Prowly also helps you:

• Monitor print coverage from global and regional outlets
• Track broadcast media, including TV, radio, and podcasts
• Easily insert traditional media mentions into PR dashboards

These features are ideal for reporting on high-visibility campaigns or executive interviews.

Here are some examples of how traditional media mentions appear in your PR reports:

5. Generate custom PR reports in minutes

At the end of your reporting cycle, generate stunning, data-rich PR reports with just a few clicks. Customize layout, highlight key wins, and present clear insights your manager or clients will love.

🎯 No more screenshots or spreadsheets—just clean, credible data backed by real results.

Tips for tracking brand mentions

If you're new to tracking brand mentions, we have a few handy tips to help you get started.

📌 It's not just the brand name

Brand mention tools let you track literally any term you can think of. This means you can choose a wide variety of terms alongisde your brand name. For example:

• spokesperson names
• online authors
• authors you want to track online
• product names (e.g. "CRM software")
• category terms (e.g. "healthcare communications")

And all of this for yourself and for your competitors.

While your brand term should be the first thing to start with, don't limit yourself. Every brand mentions tracking tool comes with a number of keywords you can track by a specific plan, so make good use of those keywords.

📌 Analyze your sentiment on the fly

Great monitoring software like Prowly does more than just collect brand mentions. As each mention comes in, Prowly analyzes the context around it and sorts the mentions according to sentiment, organizing them into three groups:

• positive
• neutral
• negative

This lets you sort all of your brand mentions automatically using language learning algorithms. For example, if you see a large number of negative mentions coming in over a short period of time, this means that a crisis is looming and you need to look into it.

📌 Track variations of your brand name

If you assume that your (potential) customers know how to spell your brand name perfectly, you're wrong. Depending on what the brand name is, there could be many alternatives that people use. For example, you could search for "Mailchimp" or "mail chimp" with equal success. If you set up just one of these as a term to track, you could miss out on valuable mentions.

📌 Don’t underestimate print, TV or radio mentions

Although most of our information comes from online sources, print, TV, and radio remain crucial media types. They are often seen as more "prestigious" since earning mentions in these outlets is generally more challenging.

Conclusion

Tracking brand mentions is not an afterthought, it's a vital part of a great PR strategy. No matter what industry you're in, tracking brand mentions allow you to stay on top of reputation management, avert crises, and keep an eye on your competition.

And it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg to get started, either. With Prowly, you can start monitoring the web for your branded (and other) terms today completely free for 7 days.

The post What Are Brand Mentions and How to Track & Analyze Them appeared first on Prowly.

Tracking media mentions is essential for understanding your brand’s visibility and reputation across all channels. Just like other core PR metrics, mentions need to be consistently and accurately monitored to measure the impact of your work.

This includes keeping tabs on both traditional media coverage and online conversations, where discussions about your brand may be occurring organically — and often without your involvement.

In this guide, we’ll explore what media mentions really mean, how to track them effectively, and how they fit into your daily PR workflow.

What is a media mention?

A media mention on the best days in PR feels like kicking a field goal. It's a major score! On the most challenging days, negative press mentions can throw a wrench into your best-laid plans and pivot your PR campaign into a new direction. 

The definition of “media mentions” can also depend on a PR campaign's goals. For a specific campaign or client, the definition may also include mentions on social media and in online discussion forums.

PR professionals track media mentions for the brands they represent and their competitors. They also track keywords related to the brand's industry to determine the most discussed topics at the moment.

Tracking media mentions is a frequent and regular task for PR. It is often done daily to keep track of what news is breaking online.

Why are media mentions important?

So why is so much time and energy invested in tracking media mentions?

Because media mentions increase brand awareness, a critical function of PR for a brand's sales funnel.

Here’s why they matter:

• Visibility
  Every mention expands your reach. Whether it’s a feature in a niche blog or a shout-out on social media, mentions put your brand in front of new audiences — often organically.
• Social proof
  Mentions act as third-party validation. When media outlets, influencers, or communities talk about your brand, it builds trust and credibility in ways ads can’t.
• SEO impact
  Online media coverage often includes backlinks — helping you climb search engine rankings and drive long-term organic traffic.
• Measurable PR results
  Tracking mentions over time helps you connect PR efforts to tangible outcomes like reach, sentiment shifts, share of voice, and sales conversions — essential for reporting and budget justification.
• Crisis monitoring
  Mentions help you spot emerging issues early. Real-time alerts mean you can act fast before a small problem blooms into a brand crisis.
• Stakeholder confidence
  Regular media visibility boosts your reputation with investors, partners, and internal teams. It shows your brand has momentum.

In monthly PR reports, media mentions are also highlighted and assessed for individual value. They are typically what a PR's client or supervisor views as “results” at the end of a PR campaign.

This is exactly why a PR professional wants to catch all media mentions and identify the particular value of each one.

How to track media mentions

Tracking media mentions is one of a PR professional's most important tasks. It's that one PR task that will never get skipped because it's so closely linked to measuring the value of your work.

PR professionals use one of three methods to track mentions:

• Media monitoring tools
• Google Alerts
• Manual searches

→ Media monitoring tools

Media monitoring tools and brand monitoring tools do all the heavy lifting for you, automatically tracking media mentions and sending you alerts based on your custom filters. They're reliable, provide data in a user-friendly manner, and can even generate your monthly PR reports.

Tracking media mentions using media monitoring tools help you:

• Track mentions across digital, print, broadcast, social, and podcasts
• Save hours by automating what would manually take days
• Analyze sentiment, reach, and trends and present it all on one dashboard
• Stay ahead of crises by catching negative press early

Some tools, like Prowly, let you monitor both digital and print & broadcast media. To ensure you don't miss anything important, make sure you're tracking mentions across all core media channels, including:

• Broadcast
• Print
• Online news and blogs
• Social media
• Discussions and communities
• Podcasts

Print media mentions

While less immediate, print mentions — such as those in newspapers and magazines — still carry prestige and long-term brand value. With print monitoring, you can get instant access to several global, national, regional, and local newspapers, trade publications, consumer magazines, and business journals.

Make sure your monitoring tool can track both and digital and print mentions.

Broadcast mentions

TV and radio still shape public perception, especially in regional or traditional markets.

Broadcast mentions are harder to track manually — this is where media monitoring tools shine.

Online news & blog mentions

Still the go-to source for industry updates and breaking news. Mentions in online publications or influential blogs often signal credibility and authority. 

Tip: Track branded keywords, executive names, and campaign mentions.

Social media

Mentions here spread fast — and wide. Social buzz can amplify a campaign or spiral into crisis.

Tip: Monitor platforms like X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram for brand mentions, hashtags, and sentiment.

Discussions & communities

Your brand might be discussed in forums like Reddit, Quora, or niche Slack groups — often with raw, honest feedback.

Tip: Use tools that pick up on mentions beyond the mainstream.

Podcasts

Podcasts are an increasingly influential space, especially in B2B and niche industries. Mentions here often come with more in-depth commentary.

Tip: Some advanced tools even transcribe and index podcast content.

For a more detailed guide on how to effectively conduct media monitoring, including setting up queries and analyzing your results, check out our article: How to Do Media Monitoring: Tips & Best Practices.

→ Google Alerts

The second method is using Google Alerts, which is often tempting because it’s a free service that’s simple to set up. However, we’ve already written about how limited its results can be.

Many mentions get missed, and the alerts aren’t always timely. Essentially, it’s not reliable enough to trust with this important task.

After trying both methods, most PR professionals decide to track brand mentions most easily, using media monitoring tools.

→ The manual search

This is when a PR professional searches for brand names and keywords in multiple search engines to find mentions. Yes, we’re talking about entering a list of keywords one by one into Google and looking through pages of results.

Since media mentions tracking is usually a daily task, you can quickly see how much time this can take away from a busy PR pro’s schedule! Even if this work is delegated to a junior team member, there is a substantial cost involved with the necessary labor hours.

How to never miss a media mention

With so much at stake, it’s no wonder PR professionals turn to automated PR software like Prowly to get solid media monitoring coverage and build impressive PR reports that “wow” their clients.

Here is what you need to do to stay informed: 

1. Set up comprehensive monitoring

In Prowly's media monitoring, you can simply set:

• Brand names
• Spokesperson mentions
• Keywords
• Backlinks
• Specific authors

The tool scans online news sites, blogs, and discussion platforms like Reddit to dig up relevant media mentions — even picking up backlinks to your website and campaign URLs.

Not only can Prowly's media monitoring tool find international mentions, but it can also find mentions before Google has even indexed them, so you can see them earlier than a manual Google search would provide. 

2. Set up filtering

Customize your monitoring to focus on what's most relevant: 

• Source types: Choose between digital, print, broadcast, or social media sources.
• Geographical filters: Narrow down mentions by country or region.
• Language preferences: Monitor mentions in specific languages.

In the Prowly Media Monitoring, you can set up email alerts tailored to your preferences — so when you start your workday, your latest media mentions are already waiting in your inbox. No more manual scanning.

3. Add context & insight

Prowly doesn’t stop at finding mentions — it adds context with detailed metrics like:

• Sentiment
• Domain authority
• Estimated reach

Your results are presented in a clean, easy-to-navigate dashboard, letting you analyze, strategize, and act faster.

You can also track advanced metrics like Share of Voice and AVE alternatives, giving you a fuller picture of your PR impact.

4. Create custom PR reports

PR automation software turns recurring tasks that feel like a chore into a valuable dashboard where campaign results can be analyzed and reported quickly. 

With PR automation, you spend less time chasing mentions and more time responding strategically.
Plus, having faster access to results-driven data helps you pivot underperforming campaigns or double down on what’s working.

Getting started with media mention monitoring

PR pros approach media mention monitoring in three ways: manual research, Google Alerts, or media monitoring tools. 

All can provide data to analyze and report, but only one approach provides real-time, thorough data with details like sentiment, reach, and media outlet importance. 

If you’re ready to try a media monitoring tool (with added PR reporting!), we’re here to help you get started as soon as possible.

The post Media Mentions Guide: How to Track Media Mentions Effectively appeared first on Prowly.

But what is Share of Voice exactly and why does it even matter?

Share of Voice, also known as SOV, is the percentage of mentions your brand has out of all brand mentions in your market.

This article explores the definition of share of voice and discusses its importance to both PR and your marketing strategy. We'll then answer the big question of how to track share of voice for your brand.

What is Share of Voice (SOV)?

Share of voice has different definitions depending on the platform you're measuring it on. Here are some of the most common SOV instances:

Share of voice in PR

Share of voice for PR refers to your unpaid, organic searches and number of online mentions of your brand on media websites, blogs, and discussion forums. It essentially tracks your brand visibility and awareness with your target audience.

PPC share of voice

Share of voice in paid advertising is a measure of market share percentage, known by marketing metrics such as PPC share of voice and others, which you may find in your Google Ads account. 

In it, you focus on paid ads and PPC, or pay-per-click. Calculating this marketing measurement mainly involves data found in Google Ads to help establish your total market share through paid advertising.

SEO share of voice

SEO share of voice measurement shows you how much real estate you occupy in search engine results compared to your competitors for a specific set of keywords. You can measure SEO SOV with the following formula:

(Estimated traffic your site gets from target keywords ÷ Total estimated traffic from those keywords for all competitors) × 100

This gives you a percentage that reflects your presence and authority through organic search.

However, most businesses and SEO professionals use tools such as Semrush that are more accurate in measuring this metric.

Social media share of voice

Social media share of voice describes the percentage of the total social media presence you hold in your industry and in front of your target audience, as compared to your competitors and their social media accounts.

Social media SOV tracks social media mentions of your brand across platforms (like Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok), as compared to the total mentions of your competitors or your entire industry. This often includes hashtags, tags, direct mentions, or keyword usage.

Market share vs. share of voice

Market share and share of voice are related, but they focus on different performance dimensions.

Market share is your portion of total sales volume in your industry. It reflects how much revenue your business makes compared to competitors. For example, if your company earns $10M in a $100M market, your market share is 10%.

Share of Voice (SoV) measures how visible your brand is across marketing channels, such as SEO, social media, or ads, compared to others. It’s about brand presence, not sales. If your brand has 20% of all mentions or impressions in your niche, that’s a 20% share of voice.

In short:

• Market share = financial performance
• Share of voice = brand visibility

While market share shows how much of the market you own, share of voice shows how much of the conversation you’re part of. A strong SoV often leads to increased market share over time.

Why you should measure Share of Voice

With so many different metrics for measuring your sales, PR, and marketing efforts, it seems like a chore to add SOV to your long list of things to report.

However, SOV can give you some extremely valuable insights.

1. PR professionals measure share of voice online to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns. Spotting increases in share of voice before and after a dedicated campaign helps point out successes and areas for improvement.
2. They also use it to assess their general ranking in the competitive landscape.
3. Comparing a brand's share of voice against other market players determines which brand is leading. It reveals what aspirational competitors to follow and which industry topics get the most engagement from your demographic. 
4. Finally, it indicates which brand is gaining on you and stands a chance of taking over your narrative.

This share of voice calculation in competitive analysis essentially points out which brands are leading the pack, those setting their footprints on results pages or SERPs. This prompts your team to look into their latest marketing campaigns and decide whether the leading trends filling the hashtags are territory your brand should pursue.

How to calculate share of voice? Standard SOV formula

To appropriately calculate the share of voice, you'll first need to find two key details:

1. The total online mentions for your brand name during a given period
2. The total mentions of all brands in your market during the same time period

With this data, you can apply the most widely used share of voice formula:

(the total number of your brand's online mentions ÷ the total number of brand mentions in your market)

This allows you to understand the percentage of share of voice your brand has achieved in the chosen period, similar to calculations for impression share columns.

While the formula is simple, getting your hands on the calculation factors can be tricky. They involve searching and tallying mentions for your brand and all competing brands across multiple search engines and major social media networks.

Doing this manually is a huge effort, and ultimately, you'll be working with estimates. The output you create will be nothing short of an educated guess.

The best way to calculate share of voice, then, is to use a dedicated social listening tool such as Prowly that captures relevant keywords as they are mentioned in real time, all across the web and social media.

However, if you're committed to calculating your share of voice, you may want to ignore total market SOV altogether.

Instead, you may want to do a simple competitive analysis and focus on how many mentions you see against your closest competitor. You can use their total monthly mentions as a benchmark for your own brand mentions.

Don't forget sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis means discovering how people feel when they talk about you online. Customer sentiment is a handy metric, especially if you can measure it with AI-based tools instead of doing it manually.

Along with reach and engagement, sentiment rounds out your brand's full online presence and gives you a complete picture of the discussion around your brand. 

For example, an emerging PR crisis can be marked by a sharp increase in share of voice on LinkedIn or other platforms but with a purely negative sentiment. You'll want to know about this change as soon as possible.

The problem is that most companies won't notice if they suddenly get hundreds of negative mentions from LinkedIn or a similar platform. And by the time they notice, the crisis is in full swing, affecting everything from your brand reputation to your website traffic.

The key to solving this issue is using a PR platform such as Prowly that captures new mentions as they happen and uses AI to assign sentiment to each one. If Prowly spots a sudden spike in negative mentions, it alerts you to the possible crisis that may be brewing.

💡Read our guide about how to do media monitoring effectively and learn best practices and tips.

How do you know if your share of voice is good or not?

You may be wondering: What is a good share of voice percentage?

The problem is that we can't tell you because it depends on various factors. Your industry, the competitive landscape, your ongoing marketing and PR efforts, and so much more.

To determine whether your SOV is good, you need to measure it for a prolonged period of time. This means doing competitor research and seeing how your SOV comparea against others over time.

P.S. Here’s an article that might come in handy if you’re looking for a tool to measure the impact of your communication efforts.

The major benefit of Share of Voice tools 

While share of voice is incredibly useful to capture, it also requires a lot of time and manual labor. In small businesses, agencies, marketing and PR teams, measuring SOV across various marketing channels manually just might not be possible.

But automated analytics tools, such as Prowly, can do the heavy lifting for you. Set up your keywords and campaign channels and you can monitor any particular brand that comes to mind - yours or your competitors.

Media monitoring tools can measure share of voice and conduct share of voice analysis, including sentiment analysis. Essentially becoming that SOV calculator you've been dreaming of.

Tip: check the scope of monitoring tools

Using tools for share of voice measurement saves time and provides real-time insights. Some of these tools can also perform sentiment analysis and track mentions across various media types.

Most of them track digital mentions and competitor metrics only: social media, review websites, blogs, online magazines, etc.

Although most of our information comes from online sources, print, TV, and radio remain crucial media platforms. They are often seen as more "prestigious" since earning mentions in these outlets is generally more challenging and securing press coverage in them boosts visibility and credibility.

Tools like Prowly give you the best of both worlds. They monitor digital and traditional media, including print monitoringand broadcasts, so you can:

• Easily analyze your results using customizable dashboards, complete with new filters that simplify evaluating the impact of your campaigns
• Ensure comprehensive coverage from diverse sources and evaluate print media investments and campaign ROI with advanced filters

Monitoring share of voice is best left to media monitoring tools. Among the tools used to measure share of voice is Prowly's PR automation software, which has handy SOV widgets.

💡 Tip: When choosing a media monitoring service, make sure it’s tailored to local media — for example, the UK market.

How do you calculate your share of voice with an automated PR tool like Prowly?

You don't have to calculate anything, because the tool does everything for you automatically.

Prowly's media monitoring tool simplifies share of voice calculation by:

• Tracking online mentions of your brand and your competitors.
• Using custom filters like media type, sentiment, backlinks, and languages.
• Tracking mentions in blogs, forums, print, and broadcast media.
• Providing various reporting graphs to visualize change over time.

Prowly tracks your share of voice across online media for you. More specifically, delivering the ability to:

• Focus on your competitors' brands and the keywords relevant to your company.
• Choose custom filters like media type, sentiment, backlinks, and languages.
• Track mentions in blog posts and in discussion groups like Reddit and Quora.
• Select your preferred type of reporting graph, like bar or donut, and even put insights on a timeline to visualize changes by the day.
• Track your brand experts and their current positioning, such as the number of times your CEO is mentioned alongside your brand.

Essentially, Prowly's media monitoring tool delivers the valuable SOV analysis you've been looking for.

It can easily calculate the number of times mentions occur for your brand and all competing brands.

Take a look at an example of Prowly's share of voice calculation to see how the data is organized:

The best tools to measure share of voice for your brand

At this point, you hopefully know that tracking SOV across different marketing channels manually is nearly impossible. These are some of the best products to help you measure share of voice, online and offline.

1. Prowly (best overall for measuring SoV)

Pricing: Starts at $258/month with a free trial available.

Prowly is an all-in-one PR software solution that makes it easy to track media mentions, analyze coverage, and measure your brand’s share of voice in the press. It’s ideal for PR teams and marketers who want clear, actionable insights into how their brand is performing across editorial media.

Top features:

• Share of voice analytics that compare your brand to competitors in real time
• Media monitoring across online news outlets, blogs, and podcasts
• AI-powered coverage filtering to identify valuable mentions
• Automated reports that visualize trends, sentiment and SoV share
• Media database with access to over 1 million journalists and outlets

2. Brand24

Pricing: Starts at $99/month with a 14-day free trial.

Brand24 is a social listening and media monitoring tool that helps you understand what people are saying about your brand online. It’s especially useful for tracking your social media share of voice, sentiment, and engagement over time.

Top features:

• Mentions tracking across social media, forums, news, and blogs
• Sentiment analysis to monitor brand perception
• Competitive comparison to benchmark your SoV against others
• Alerts and notifications for spikes in mentions or negative feedback
• Exportable reports for teams and clients

3. Semrush (best for measuring SEO SoV)

Pricing: Starts at $129.95/month with a 7-day free trial available.

Semrush is a leading SEO and digital marketing platform and one of the best tools for tracking SEO share of voice. It allows you to see how your visibility in search compares to your competitors' across custom keyword sets.

Top features:

• Position tracking for specific keywords and domains
• SEO share of voice reports based on estimated traffic and rankings
• Competitive analysis to uncover keyword gaps and traffic share
• Organic research for visibility trends
• Custom dashboards to monitor changes over time

How to increase your share of voice in PR

So, you've either decided to manually calculate share of voice for your brand or you are using an automated tool to gather the data.

What comes next?

With these share of voice metrics in hand, you can now begin to strategize how to increase your share of voice measurement against the competition.

💡The time-tested tactics we recommend trying:

• Utilize your social media platforms and keep them up-to-date with frequent content that both provides value to your customers and nails your brand messaging home.
• Consistently add new SEO-rich blog posts to your website that focus on topics of importance for your current and potential customers.
• Engage regularly with customer comments, either on social media or in discussion forums, and engage with both positive and negative comments to build trust and loyalty.
• Reach out to the media consistently with exciting story pitches about topics getting attention in your market. Use an automated PR software tool to manage and deliver consistent media outreach.
• Run paid ad campaigns to supplement your earned media efforts and share of voice data. Keep brand messaging consistent.
• Share the expertise of your brand spokespeople, offering the media your brand leaders as experts in current trending topics.
• Get customers more involved with your brand. For example, conduct online polls where customers can help influence small company decisions like voting on the style of dress to manufacture for a new season.

When developing these strategies, note what messaging and content work best for your competitors. You may be able to create your own brand stories around these topics.

Looking for a way to measure your PR performance? Read our guide on PR Reporting: How to Measure Media Coverage.

Wrapping up

Share of voice is one of those brand metrics you can't ignore. It lets you not only compare yourself against the competition, but also against your previous performance. Unfortunately, measuring it is not for the weak of heart... If you do it manually.

With Prowly as your partner, we'll take care of the hard work so you can get SOV metrics with one click of a button. And that's just one of the many great PR features in Prowly.

Frequently asked questions

How to calculate share of voice in PR?

To calculate share of voice in PR, divide your brand’s earned media coverage by the total media coverage for all competitors in your industry, then multiply by 100.

Formula:
SOV (%) = (Your brand coverage / Total market coverage) × 100
This helps you understand how visible your brand is compared to others in your space.

What is a good tool for measuring share of voice?

Several tools can measure share of voice across media and digital channels. Popular platforms include Prowly, Brand24and SEMrush (for SEO share of voice). These tools track media mentions, sentiment, and visibility across news outlets, blogs, and social media.

What is an example of SOV analysis?

Typical SOV analysis might compare the media mentions of five brands in the same sector. For example, if your brand received 500 mentions in a month and your four competitors received 300, 100, 50, and 50 mentions respectively, your total market coverage is 1,000.
Your SOV = (500 / 1,000) × 100 = 50%
This means your brand had half of the media visibility in that space for that time period.

The post Share of Voice Guide: Calculation, Tools, and Best Practices appeared first on Prowly.

Check how to measure brand recall and which brand marketing metrics are the most important ones.

You must follow brand metrics to keep them in line and care for your image.

A good software, such as Prowly, may help you with that. Keep reading or try it for free and start tracking brands right away.

Brand metrics - what are they?

Brand metrics are measurable indicators that assess a brand's health, performance, and perception.

They are vital for gaining the impact of PR efforts because they translate sorts of abstraction like reputation and awareness into actionable data.

PR plays a crucial role in shaping brand health over time, not just through one-off campaign successes but by building trust. It supports recognition and influences public perception consistently.

Examples?

👉 PR amplifies brand awareness by securing media coverage and driving engagement on social platforms. Moreover, it enhances brand perception through positive sentiment.

👉 By tracking metrics such as media mentions, sentiment analysis, website traffic, and conversion rates, businesses can understand how PR contributes to long-term brand equity.

Below you can find some tips on brand tracking metrics as well as gain a practical framework for measuring PR’s impact on brand performance. And all of that is supported by real-world examples that illustrate how strategic PR can drive meaningful business outcomes.

What are brand metrics exactly (and why are they important)?

Brand metrics help you understand how well your brand is performing over time.
Unlike marketing KPIs (like conversions, clicks, or sales) focusing on short-term success, brand metrics give you a bigger picture.

They measure aspects like brand awareness, reputation, and customer perception - showing how your brand connects with people and stands out from the competition.

For PR, these metrics are crucial in building brand equity and trust over time.

Activities like media coverage, storytelling, and reputation management help shape how audiences perceive a brand. The better they see the brand, the more loyal they are. In many cases, that means more than a temporary sales peak.

👉 If you build a solid strong image, customers will come back and bring new ones.

👉 As a result, your sales will be growing and assure you a good position long-term.

Core categories of brand metrics include awareness (how recognizable the brand is), perception (how positively it is viewed), equity (the value attributed to the brand), and reputation (the trustworthiness and reliability associated with it).

By focusing on these areas, PR professionals can demonstrate their role in driving meaningful business outcomes and sustaining long-term brand growth.

10 brand metrics every PR pro should track

You know what brand metrics are in general but let's dig into details. Below you can find a list of 10 indicators that will help you with branding measurement.

Let's dive in!

#1 Share of Voice (SOV)

Share of Voice reflects how much media coverage your brand gets compared to competitors.

Why it matters?

A higher SOV means more brand visibility and authority in your niche. If you are wondering how to measure brand strength, it's your go-to brand metric.

How to measure it?

Track brand mentions across news, social media, and industry publications. And then compare versus competitors.

💡 How Prowly helps
Use Prowly’s media monitoring tools to track brand mentions and compare SOV with competitors. With Prowly you can follow also keywords related to your brand as well as those competitors related.

#2 Brand awareness

Brand awareness shows how well your audience recognizes and recalls your brand.

Why it matters?

High awareness means customers think of your brand first when considering a product or service in your category. This is some sort of brand popularity metric.

How to measure it?

Monitor organic brand mentions in media, branded search volume, and direct website traffic.

💡 How Prowly helps
Prowly’s media monitoring features help track brand mentions and sentiment over time. You can follow not only mentions across the web but also print and broadcast ones.

#3 Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis evaluates whether conversations about your brand are positive, negative, or neutral.

Why it matters?

Helps PR teams understand brand perception and identify potential reputation risks.

How to measure it?

Use e.g. AI-powered sentiment analysis tools to assess the tone of media coverage and social conversations. You can also use all-in-one platforms like Prowly with a built-in sentiment analysis feature.

💡 How Prowly helps
Leverage Prowly’s sentiment analysis to track media tone and adjust PR strategies accordingly. The platform indicates if the tone is positive, negative, or neutral.

#4 Brand salience (Top-of-Mind recall)

This one reflects how quickly and frequently consumers think of your brand when prompted with a category.

Why it matters

Strong brand salience increases the likelihood of being chosen over competitors.

How to measure it

Conduct consumer surveys and track unaided recall rates.

💡 How Prowly helps
Prowly’s media monitoring tools help track how often your brand is mentioned in relevant industry discussions, which can be an indicator of salience. Additionally, its PR analytics provide insights into media trends that can impact top-of-mind recall.

#5 Brand reputation

This one indicates how your brand is seen. It is shaped by media narratives, customer trust, and overall public perception.

Why it matters?

A strong reputation builds credibility, while a negative one can deter potential customers and partners.

How to measure it?

Assess media sentiment, customer reviews, and trust indicators in industry reports.

💡 How Prowly helps
Use Prowly’s media analysis tools to monitor sentiment and detect reputation shifts.

#6 Brand consistency

Thus brand metric ensures that your brand’s messaging, tone, and values remain consistent across all channels.

Why it matters?

Inconsistent messaging can confuse audiences and weaken brand trust. So its crucial to keep the tone coherent.

How to measure it?

Analyze PR content, press releases, and media mentions for alignment with brand messaging.

💡 How Prowly helps
Use Prowly’s press release and media database tools to standardize messaging.

#7 Media engagement

This brand metric measures how well media outlets engage with your campaigns.

Why it matters?

Strong media engagement boosts credibility, SEO, and audience reach.

How to measure it?

Track media coverage, journalist responses, and backlinks to brand content.

💡 How Prowly helps
Prowly’s journalist outreach and press release tools help secure media coverage.

#8 Brand equity

Brand equity is the overall value and strength of your brand in the eyes of consumers.

Why it matters?

High brand equity means customers are willing to pay a premium and stay loyal.

How to measure it?
Analyze brand preference, loyalty metrics, and willingness to pay for your products/services.

💡 How Prowly helps
Prowly’s media monitoring and sentiment analysis tools help track consumer perception and public sentiment toward your brand. Additionally, PR analytics can provide insights into how media coverage impacts brand loyalty and perceived value.

#9 PR crises & spikes in mentions

It detects anomalies. For example, sudden increases in brand mentions. These may often linked to PR crises or viral events.

Why it matters?

Helps PR teams respond quickly to mitigate risks or leverage opportunities. The sooner you know, the better answer you can craft.

How to measure it?

Monitor media trends for unusual spikes in coverage or sentiment shifts.

💡 How Prowly helps
Use Prowly’s media monitoring alerts to detect and respond to crises in real time. You can also benefit from sentiment analysis and be aware that negative mentions are rising.

#10 Brand recognition metric

This brand metric measures consumer familiarity with your brand’s logo, name, or tagline.

Why it matters?

Strong brand recognition ensures that consumers can easily identify your brand in crowded markets. E.g. golden arches (McDonald's) or white, red and blue in a circle (Pepsi)

How to measure it?

Conduct consumer surveys, focus groups, and analyze qualitative feedback.

💡 How Prowly helps
With this tool, you can monitor mentions across the web and analyze what people say about your brand.

How to measure brand performance over time

Follow the below steps to benefit from brand metrics analyses.

#1 Tip: Consistent tracking

Being regular pays off. Track brand metrics monthly or quarterly. It helps you to identify trends and assess the impact of marketing campaigns.

You can also use tools like dashboards for real-time tracking and visualization of key metrics, ensuring actionable insights.

#2 Tip: Benchmarking against competitors

Benefit from Share of Voice to measure your brand’s presence compared to competitors.

• How to measure it: Share of Voice (SOV)=Your Brand Metrics/Total Market Metrics
• or do it automatically in Prowly

Compare sentiment scores to index audience perception and brand tone over time. Follow posts about your competitors and narrative about them, too.

💡 Read this article on Share of Voice in PR and make sure you make the most of SoV with little effort.

#3 Tip: Tools and templates

You can use downloadable templates like monthly or quarterly marketing reports to streamline the process of data collection and reporting. These templates can help consolidate metrics like reach, impressions, and conversions into a single report.

By combining consistent tracking, competitive benchmarking, and actionable reporting tools like Prowly's PR reports, you can effectively measure and improve your brand performance over time.

P.S. To truly understand and measure brand impact, it helps to first explore how visible your brand is—this guide to brand visibility breaks it down.

💡 Prowly users can generate client-facing PR reports that visualize brand visibility, tone, and media reach with just a few clicks, making it easier to communicate results with stakeholders.

Reporting brand metrics to stakeholders

Tips for creating executive-ready data visuals

1. Prioritize key metrics.
   To prevent information overload, focus on essential data points like SOV, brand sentiment, and media reach. There you need actual data.
2. Leverage visuals.
   Use charts, graphs, and infographics to simplify complex information. Pie charts work well for sentiment analysis, while trend lines effectively illustrate media reach.
3. Customize.
   Tailor the level of detail to the stakeholder’s role. Senior executives benefit from high-level summaries, while marketing teams may need deeper insights. All your actions are about knowing your recipients,
4. Delive context.
   Compare data to past performance and competitors to highlight trends and benchmarks clearly. Show how the market has changed over time.

Brand metrics you should include in your reports

A comprehensive report should include all essential data to gather the whole complex. There is no need for extensive storytelling and extra information. Just go straight to the point. What to include?

• Media coverage & mentions - a breakdown of your press features, media placements, and journalist interactions in a specific period.
• Share of Voice - show your brand’s visibility compared to competitors across the media (online and offline).
• Sentiment analysis - bring a summary of positive, neutral, and negative mentions to assess brand perception.
• Key campaign performance - show your PR campaign results, including media reach, audience engagement, and ROI.
• Social media & digital metrics - back to the roots, i.e. growth in followers, engagement rates, and and reach.
• Takeaways & further actions - present insights and deliver recommendations for the next steps.

Sample OKRs for brand metrics

Setting clear objectives and key results (OKRs) helps track brand performance effectively. Here are a few examples:

1️⃣ Objective: Increase brand visibility in the media.

OKR examples:

• Increase Share of Voice (SOV) by 20% over six months.
• Secure at least 5 Tier-1 media placements per quarter.

2️⃣ Objective: Improve brand perception.

OKR examples:

• Achieve a 3:1 positive-to-negative sentiment ratio in brand mentions.
• Increase Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 10 in the next quarter.

3️⃣ Objective: Enhance audience engagement.

OKR examples:

• Boost social media engagement rate by 5% in one month.
• Grow branded search volume by 10% over the next quarter.

The above list is just an exemplary one. Feel free to adjust it to your brand, market specifications, and needs.

💡 Tip: If you want to make your PR strategy truly robust, read these articles to learn how to manage your brand reputation and protect its reputation.

Common mistakes in brand measurement metrics

You know what to do when it comes to brand metrics, but know it's time for the list of your don'ts.

• Relying too much on vanity metrics – likes and followers may look impressive but don’t always reflect true brand impact or audience sentiment.
• Not measuring message alignment or media tone – tracking only coverage volume without assessing tone can lead to misleading conclusions about brand perception.
• Skipping long-term tracking – focusing only on short-term campaign results makes it difficult to measure sustained brand growth and reputation.
• Not aligning brand metrics with PR goals – following metrics that don’t connect to overall PR and business objectives can lead to wasted effort and misdirected strategies.
• Overlooking security issues – failing to ensure data integrity and protect proprietary insights can compromise reporting accuracy and decision-making. Do not overlook password security, 2FA and timely review of your accounts and content.

💡 Extra Tip: Add a mini checklist for your marketing to secure social accounts and align teams before going public.

How to use brand metrics in business? Case studies & good practices

Time for practice. Let's dive into some examples on how brand uses these metrics to save their image.

Tracking sentiment during a crisis – H&M’s backlash (2018)

When H&M faced criticism over an ad featuring a Black kid wearing a hoodie with the phrase “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle”, the brand monitored real-time sentiment analysis to assess public reaction. As you may presume the negativity was overwhelming. It led to an apology, removal of the ad, and a commitment to improving diversity efforts.

Measuring media coverage post-rebrand – Dunkin’ drops “Donuts” (2019)

When Dunkin' Donuts rebranded to simply Dunkin’, the company analyzed media coverage and public reception.

By tracking news sentiment and social media discussions, Dunkin’ confirmed that consumers embraced the modernized brand identity while still associating it with coffee and breakfast.

Using Share of Voice (SOV) to prove PR ROI – Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola

Pepsi has long used SOV metrics to measure its media presence compared to Coca-Cola. So what are they doing?

By tracking mentions, ad spending, and media coverage, Pepsi's PR teams can demonstrate the effectiveness of campaigns like Super Bowl ads or celebrity endorsements. Living proof of proving their marketing investments values.

P.S. Even Pepsi makes PR mistakes. You can read about their campaign that was widely criticized (and why it went so wrong.

How tools like Prowly help PR pros track brand metrics

#1 Simplifying media monitoring

Prowly offers a straightforward way to monitor brand mentions across various platforms. It analyzes the sentiment and tone. It provides valuable insights into how your brand is perceived. Moreover, you gain real-time updates, so you can stay on top of every conversation about you.

#2 Building strong media relationships

The Journalist CRM feature helps you manage your media contacts effectively. You can track interactions and build a history of engagement. Thus, there is a way to foster stronger relationships with journalists, increasing your chances of securing media coverage that aligns with your brand's message.

#3 Effective press release distribution

Prowly makes distributing press releases easier. How? By customizable templates and access to a vast media database. So you can be sure that your message reaches the right audience, amplifying your brand's visibility and share of voice.

#4 Reporting made easy

Creating reports is streamlined with Prowly's customizable reporting tools. Whether you're part of an agency or an in-house team, these reports help you present campaign results clearly and effectively to stakeholders.

Prowly is an intuitive platform that will help you manage your workflow efficiently, track brand metrics accurately, and enhance overall brand presence.

Brand metrics - summing up

You want a strong, lasting brand reputation?

Metrics like sentiment analysis, customer satisfaction, and share of voice provide insights that may give you a hand.

But remember, proactive tracking ensures you stay ahead of potential issues and adapt strategies to meet evolving consumer expectations, rather than waiting until the end of a campaign to assess impact. Ready to take control of your brand’s reputation? You can keep your finger on the pulse with Prowly’s powerful features.

The post Brand Metrics - How to Measure Your Brand Impact appeared first on Prowly.

Every dollar spent on marketing and public relations needs to have a clear return on investment. While this is nothing new for the world of marketing, public relations is still fairly new to measuring the impact of work done on the bottom line.

So, how do you measure brand performance, including brand loyalty and brand sentiment? And what should you be tracking in the first place?

What is brand performance?

Brand performance measures a brand's strength and success over time by measuring how well it achieves its business goals in areas like awareness, customer perception, loyalty, and financial returns.

When measuring brand performance, it's important to understand the difference between short-term results and long-term brand equity.

Short-term results focus on immediate gains like sales spikes or ad conversions, while long-term brand equity is about building lasting value through gaining trust, recognition, and customer loyalty.

Short-term wins deliver quick impacts but may fade fast, whereas brand equity grows slowly and supports sustained business success.

The best brands balance both to drive growth now without sacrificing future strength.

Challenges in measuring brand performance

Measuring brand performance metrics can be complex for a variety of reasons.

👉 For agencies, it can be difficult to measure brand performance for multiple clients spread across different platforms and audiences.

Factor in that every client has different expectations and budgets, and it can become a challenge to measure key performance indicators for each brand consistently.

👉 For in-house teams, the biggest challenge can be to align PR efforts and brand metrics with marketing KPIs.

When you measure brand performance over time, it may be difficult to prove the long-term value and show return on investment to win a greater budget for your team.

What to track for brand performance (that actually gives results)

Depending on who you work for and your end goals, the way you measure brand performance can be wildly different. Some clients may want to track brand recognition, others may focus on brand loyalty, and many will only care about purchase intent and its effect on their bottom line.

Here are some great starting points when it comes to tracking brand performance.

#1 Brand awareness

When you measure brand awareness, you measure how well customers recognize your brand.

You can track brand awareness of your brand through a variety of different methods:

• Through surveys: what your customers (and potential customers) know about you and how they perceive you
• Media mentions: how many times your brand name pops up on social media channels
• Online search volume of your terms: how many customers look you up online
• Number of people who have been exposed to your brand: total reach through advertising, media coverage and other channels

Brand awareness is the basis of PR efforts, helping you determine the impact of your campaigns and how well people recognize you.

💡 How to do this with Prowly?
Use our media monitoring tool to find out how many times people mention you and in what context. It helps you find out who talks about you, on which platform and, thanks to brand sentiment analysis, you can see the emotion and intent behind each mention too.

#2 Media coverage

Media coverage is the amount and quality of exposure your brand or campaign receives in the media.

It includes several elements that help evaluate the success of your PR efforts. It includes things such as the number of mentions, type of coverage, outlet quality and more. The overall purpose of this metric is to gauge how often you're covered and by whom.

Track it through:

• The number of articles: how many unique mentions there are of your brand across platforms
• The quality of media outlets: the overall quality of the outlets that mention you, graded by the traffic of their website, their (inter)national coverage, and the type of their audience
• Top-tier publications: whether you are mentioned by the likes of New York Times, Forbes, Washington Post or others

💡 How to do this in Prowly?
With our PR reporting platform, you can track individual mentions or sum them up in a report to see an overall view of your brand health. At a glance, you can see the type of outlets that mention you, their audience, website metrics, traffic and overall quality, to determine if the coverage is a valuable outcome of your brand marketing efforts.

#3 Presence score

Presence score is a proprietary PR metric used to show your brand's visibility across a variety of platforms, like traditional media, social media, and digital platforms.

You can track it by collecting data from multiple sources: media mentions, press coverage, social media reach, combined with other visibility metrics contributing to a consistent brand identity.

It's a lot to do manually. So it's best to choose a PR tool that that tracks and provides all (or most) of this data, like Prowly.

Presence score is an excellent benchmark of how visible your brand is and how frequently it appears in the right places.

#4 Brand reputation

Brand reputation is how the public perceives a brand based on overall sentiment and trust. The higher the brand reputation, the more trustworthy you are and the easier it becomes to persuade leads to become customers.

To track your brand reputation, use a mix of the following:

• Media coverage: how many people mention you, when and in what context
• Social media posts: what platforms people use when mentioning you
• Online reviews: where people review you and what kind of ratings they give you
• Customer feedback: survey results, feedback form submissions, ratings through different channels

Brand reputation is crucial for PR efforts as it has an immediate impact on how much customers trust you, how loyal they are to your brand, and how much money they're going to spend with you. By ensuring positive media coverage and handling potential crises, you can get a grip on your brand reputation.

#5 Brand equity

Brand equity is the value you add to a product or service thanks to your brand name, customer loyalty and perceived quality.

In other words, everything besides your product that contributes to your overall sales and customer lifetime value.

There are a few ways to measure this:

• Customer surveys: ask customers how they feel about your brand shown in metrics like the Net Promoter Score
• Market research: poll your (potential) customers how they feel about the value your brand adds to your offer
• Customer loyalty metrics: Net Promoter Score, repeat purchases, lifetime value
• Overall sales performance: total sales, monthly or annual recurring revenue, customer churn, etc.

Brand equity is crucial for PR because it's often a sign of high customer loyalty and the success of your brand as a whole. Great PR and marketing strategies help keep brand equity strong over time.

#6 Share of Voice (SOV)

Share of Voice is the percentage of all the media mentions that your brand gets in comparison to your competitors. For example, you're in the mobile phone space and you want to measure how many mentions you get in comparison to Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, or other manufacturers.

Track it by:

• Using media monitoring tools: add the brand names of your brand and that of all your competitors to get a clear overview of the conversation and benchmarks for comparison
• Tracking mentions in media outlets, blogs, social media and press releases: all the channels where you and your competitors are present

💡 How to do this in Prowly?
You don't have to calculate anything because Prowly does all of the hard work for you.

Prowly can:

• Track online mentions of your brand and competitors
• Use custom filters like media type, sentiment, backlinks, and languages
• Track mentions in blogs, forums, print, and broadcast media
• Provide various reporting graphs to visualize change over time

#7 Sentiment analysis

For excellent brand engagement, people should not only mention your brand's product a lot. They should also speak well of you, which can be really hard to track with a large volume of mentions.

In other words, if 1,000 people mention you in a month, manually determining how many of those mentions are positive and how many are negative is a chore. This is where media monitoring tools like Prowly come in.

When you monitor sentiment analysis, you can get mentions of your brand categorized as:

• Positive
• Negative
• Neutral

💡 How to do this in Prowly?
Simply log into your dashboard to get an overview of your total mentions. You'll see an AI-based breakdown of your overall sentiment, including individual mentions for detailed overview and adjustment.

#8 Engagement

A great brand strategy means coverage from journalists and the attention of potential and loyal customers. For brand teams, the way people engage with a company speaks volumes about the total brand value and performance.

You can track brand engagement through:

• Social media likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Engagement levels
• Website traffic driven by PR efforts

#9 Brand visibility

Brand visibility is just that: how visible your brand is across different channels.

Strong brand performance doesn't mean being on all the social media platforms or traditional media channels. Instead, it means being present where your customers are.

Track it through:

• Brand mentions: across different platforms, breaking down your mentions per platform
• Frequency of visibility: how often your brand pops up on your most relevant channels

💡 How to do this in Prowly?
Simply add your brand name to our media monitoring tool and you'll get access to a dashboard to view where you where mentioned, when and in what context.

#10 Return on investment (ROI)

Perhaps the most important brand performance metric of all, ROI shows you just that, the amount of money the business has gained by investing in PR efforts.

ROI as a brand performance metric is important for proving the value of PR to clients, managers and stakeholders. It helps agencies and PR and marketing teams win a seat at the table and secure budget for future campaigns.

While notoriously difficult to track, it's not impossible.

💡 You can most easily track it by comparing the cost of PR campaigns (such as media outreach, press release distribution, event planning and management) with business outcomes tracked over time (increases in sales or leads, raises in brand equity).

SEO metrics

Customers with a strong brand preference will flock to your website.

If your marketing and brand campaigns are working, you'll see an increase in website traffic, especially referral traffic as a result of your PR efforts. For example, if you get mentioned in the press, on other blogs, on news websites and other sources.

You can track it through:

• Referral traffic: visits to your websites that come from other platforms
• Bounce rate: interested readers tend to "bounce" less and stick around on your website
• Time spent on site: the more engaged your readers are, the more time they will spend on the website
• Incoming backlinks: how many people link to you as a source, tracking traffic to your website, especially referral traffic driven by PR efforts (e.g., mentions in press, blogs, news sites).

💡 How do to this in Prowly?
1️⃣ Head over to Prowly's Media Monitoring tool and easily track the quantity and quality of articles that contain relevant backlinks to your site.
2️⃣ Start off by creating a dashboard filled with articles that include backlinks and sort them by domain authority (backed with data from Semrush).

Improving brand performance over time

To improve brand performance in the future, the best thing you can do is constantly measure and improve. By setting brand performance benchmarks for your business, you can find out which campaigns are working and what needs to be rethought.

Here are some best practices for adjusting your PR campaigns based on data:

• Analyze media coverage to see which outlets and messages are generating the most visibility and positive brand perception.
• Monitor engagement metrics (clicks, shares, comments) to understand what content your audience is responding to.
• Track audience sentiment using surveys, social listening, or feedback tools to gauge public perception.
• Use data to refine messaging, making sure it aligns with what your audience values and cares about.
• Adjust targeting by focusing on the most responsive demographics, channels, or regions that impact your brand health.
• Optimize timing based on when your content is most likely to gain traction.
• Be prepared to pivot quickly if results show your current strategy isn’t working.

In the end, tracking brand performance and improving it helps paint a clear picture of the value of PR efforts to your client or manager.

Over to you

You can't improve what you don't measure.

To effectively measure brand performance, define your key metrics and use the right marketing, PR, and analytics tools to aggregate that data and analyze it in real time. Knowing where you stand is half of the battle.

With Prowly, you can easily measure your branding efforts across different platforms and channels.

With features such as media monitoring, social media listening, a media database, and many others, you'll always have a clear understanding of your brand performance over time and as it unfolds.

The post What is Brand Performance and How to Measure It in 2025 appeared first on Prowly.

After all, your reputation is your brand. Something along the lines of a collective whisper behind your back, the vibe check you kind of slightly missed, and the difference between becoming a success story or a cautionary tale for PR pros.

But brand reputation isn't simply a concern to obsess over. It's a measurable process that has an impact on revenue, customer trust, and long-term growth. And yet too many companies still focus on reactive strategies instead of thinking about it proactively.

What is brand reputation management?

Brand reputation management is the process of shaping and influencing the public's perception of a brand. It involves monitoring mentions, responding to feedback and criticism, and building trust to protect a brand's positive image with its audience.

What does brand reputation management include?

More than you'd think. A good reputation management strategy can't be fit into an envelope and left to collect dust. It requires regular updates, attention, and must be fully evangelized within the company.

Here are the basics:

1️⃣ Monitoring perception

You need to be fully aware of what people are saying about your brand.

Whether it's across social media platforms, in online discussion forums, or even in newspaper coverage, your brand reputation can change in an instant if even slight changes in your audience's perception go undetected.

This is why you need to track mentions and customer feedback like a hawk.

💡 If you need a tool to help you out with that, you can try Prowly for free and see how it can help you improve your brand reputation management.

2️⃣ Crisis prevention and response

When negative feedback rolls in (which is inevitable, no matter how great of a brand you represent), you need to address it in the best manner possible. That means no robotic answers, no generic replies.

Additionally, what you can do to alleviate stress in that moment is proactively think about a response strategy before a crisis starts brewing.

💡 Tip: Explore this article to learn more about how reactive PR compares to proactive PR—and how to put it into action.

3️⃣ Brand messaging

Do all of your communications align with your brand values and brand image? It's something to think about in terms of brand reputation strategy as well.

In order to keep it all authentic, you need to know what to say, when to say it and, most importantly, how.

4️⃣ Customer experience

Think about how you're trying to improve as a brand based on customer feedback. Are you taking people's opinions into consideration?

If you're not and your audience feels like they're simply talking to a wall, that's not really building trust and fostering relationships, is it?

Make sure you have a strategy on how to communicate to your audience that you're actively improving upon, respond to reviews and comments with care, and address customer concerns as soon as possible.

P.S. Here’s an article that might come in handy if you’re looking for a tool to measure the impact of your communication efforts.

5️⃣ Competitor benchmarking

Are you really a fan favorite or are you just the loudest in the room?

It's difficult to assess your own performance if you're not benchmarking yourself against your competitors and industry. Try measuring SoV and do a thorough sentiment analysis.

💡 You can read more about these two metrics in these articles:
➖ Share of Voice in PR: How to Calculate Your Brand SOV
➖ How to Use Sentiment Analysis in PR
➖ How to Measure Brand Sentiment in PR
➖ 20+ Top Sentiment Analysis Tools for PR Pros

Who is responsible for brand reputation management?

Well, it depends.

Not necessarily the answer you wanted to see, but brand reputation management is mostly a shared responsibility across multiple departments in the company, such as:

• PR & Communications: To manage media coverage and the public's perception.
• Marketing: To align messaging, brand positioning, and ads.
• Customer support: To respond accurately and swiftly to customer feedback.
• Legal & Compliance: To keep tabs on impersonation, misinformation, and defamation.
• Human Resources: To shape employer branding the right way.
• Leadership: To speak about the brand with confidence and integrity.

What's the difference between brand reputation management and reputation marketing?

P.S. Discover more reputation marketing tips to strengthen your strategy here.

How to measure brand reputation?

#1 Sentiment and customer perception

Knowing how many times your brand was mentioned in the media is as useful as knowing how many times your name was whispered at a party without knowing particularly why. That's why, for all brand-related things, you need to monitor sentiment.

This will help you move beyond counting on sheer volume and allow you to tap into the emotional opinion of the public.

• Why it matters: A spike in mentions isn't always a success, because it may signal a brewing crisis. What helps is to track sentiment alongside volume to get the full story. Not sure where to start? Read more on how to track and analyze brand mentions.
• How to measure: Prowly's media monitoring tools let you track real-time sentiment, create custom alerts, and get a clear picture of your brand reputation management strategy.

#2 Share of Voice vs. Share of Trust

While Share of Voice focuses on how often a brand is being talked about or mentioned relative to its competitors, Share of Trust measures the quality of those mentions and overall reputation, including the audience's emotional responses.

So, which one should you measure? Both!

💡 For example, a high SOV with low brand trust means there's a reputation risk involved. If you're evaluating both SoV and SoT, you'll always know what's up.

#3 What is a reputation score?

It's a number you can benchmark your performance against. There's no general consensus on what this should be—it's more just a metric for you and your brand. It can include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures how satisfied and loyal your customers are.
• Brand sentiment: Analyzes the emotional perception and attitude of your audience towards your brand.
• Customer reviews: Track public feedback across platforms like Google, Trustpilot, and others.
• Employee perception: Shows how employees view their workplace experience.

By tracking these factors, brands can gain a more well-rounded picture of how they're actually perceived.

How to do reputation reporting the right way

What should you include in a reputation report?

When done right, a brand reputation report can turn raw data into powerful insights and give your leadership team the information they need to make strategic decisions.

Such a report should include:

• The impact of media coverage
• Sentiment trends over time
• Shifts in social media engagement
• A crisis risk assessment
• Competitive benchmarking

Keep in mind that you shouldn't just report the hard numbers. What you need to do is deliver a narrative your leadership team can trust, act on, and build a strategy around.

💡 Tip: When choosing a media monitoring service, make sure it’s tailored to local media — for example, the UK market.

Presenting reputation data to leadership

Focus on a story. A sharp, strategic narrative will explain not just what happened, but also why it matters and what to do next. Simply connect the dots for them so they can see the full picture.

Instead of saying "Sentiment dropped 12%," say, "Sentiment fell 12% following our product's recall, but our brand reputation response worked on turning things around, increasing customer trust by 23% within a month."

Additionally, don't say, "Media coverage is up." Say that, "Coverage jumped by 34%, but nearly half was negative, which flagged a potential risk to our strong brand reputation. To work against this, we..."

It's all about how you frame it. Show the cause, the effect, the opportunity, and what you did with it.

Best tools for reputation tracking

Too many software programs to choose from? Choosing the right one depends strictly on your needs, what team you are a part of, how large your brand is, and so on.

Dive into this in-depth analysis of the 13 most popular brand monitoring tools and how to choose the best one for you.

Crisis prevention: spotting risks early

Early warning signs of a reputation crisis

A one-off PR crisis might build up overnight, but a brand reputation crisis?

That doesn't just happen out of nowhere. They like to quietly simmer until something boils them over. The warning signs are usually there, but they're easy to dismiss.

Maybe your company is starting to get more negative brand mentions than usual?

Perhaps a customer complaint goes viral before your team even sees it? Or maybe an industry influencer calls you out and it starts a whole movement?

Keep in mind that these aren't just isolated incidents. Rather, they're signals, and by catching them early, it gives you an edge to respond with intention, not panic.

Reputation risk management framework

Whenever a crisis hits, the last thing you want is to choose a designated person to handle it. It should be when you roll out a previously thought-out reputation management strategy.

Think of it as your brand's emergency blueprint outlining who is responsible for what, how and when to communicate, and what it will take to take control of your story before someone else does.

Choosing the right person to be your spokesperson is key as well. Make sure they have a few statements ready, know how to respond with clarity instead of chaos, and understand the balance between being transparent and protecting the brand.

A good brand reputation management strategy answers these three questions:
1️⃣ Who is responsible for managing a crisis when it happens?
2️⃣ What is the official communication strategy?
3️⃣ How is our brand going to control the narrative?

To summarize? Don't wait until the house is on fire to find the extinguisher.

Real-time reputation monitoring

Checking your brand reputation once a week is something no one does anymore. Think of it as a luxury you just can't afford.

However, with online reputation management tools that help with real-time monitoring, you can easily detect early warning signs. Whether it's information about sentiment shifts, media mentions, or some social chatter, a good tool makes it easier to spot a potential issue before it turns into a full-blown PR crisis.

💡 With Prowly, you can set up an alert for a negative spike in mentions and get the information you need straight to your inbox. That way, you don't need to frantically check stats all the time; you can simply sit back and get an email once something comes up.

Brand protection: safeguarding your reputation

Building a strong brand reputation takes years. However, with today's social media platforms and fast-spreading information, it can all go down in an instant (unless you take all the safety precautions you can).

Preventing brand identity theft and misinformation

Anyone with Wi-Fi can start impersonating your brand on popular channels, so you need to protect your brand reputation as much as you can. Here are a few tips on what to do:

• Monitor online media for impersonations using tools like Prowly to catch fake accounts and any misleading content before it goes viral.
• Secure, verify, and authenticate official brand channels across all platforms.
• Establish an internal escalation process to identify and remove any impersonation attempts, and include your legal team if needed.
• Educate your audience on how to recognize fake accounts and products, and how to report suspicious content moving forward.

Legal and compliance considerations

While your public relations strategies may or may not include legal considerations, in many cases your brand's reputation is protected by law. It's an important thing to remember, especially in stressful situations where your brand is already in deep water.

• Trademark protection helps protect your brand name, logo, and brand assets from being used by others to impersonate you.
• Defamation monitoring ensures you're informed about false claims made about your brand.
• Proactive legal oversight can help in long-term brand reputation management by protecting your brand before issues arise.

Your positive brand reputation is managed through public relations strategies and legal protections, which keeps trouble at bay before it begins.

💡 Pro Tip: Some companies invest in reputation insurance, a specialized form of insurance coverage that helps businesses recover operationally and financially after their public image has been torn.

It includes coverage for costs incurred from public relations efforts, legal fees, and lost revenue. It's something worth considering, especially for brands that rely heavily on brand sentiment and perception.

P.S. If you want to learn all about brand protection along with useful tips and strategies, make sure to read this article.

How to integrate reputation management into marketing and PR?

Reputation-first brand messaging

If your marketing team promises a five-star experience but your customers are barely giving it a two, there's a huge disconnect there which may affect your brand reputation.

Reputation-first messaging means that both your marketing and PR teams are on the same page with what's true to the brand.

Over-promising in advertisements and making unrealistic promises devalues your brand in the long run. What will elevate it is making sure that your messaging reflects the actual customer experience.

This also means that your executives should be media-trained to represent the brand well, ensuring consistency and confidence when they speak about it. Remember that when your brand voice is built on authenticity and transparency, trust will follow naturally.

Investing in thought leadership and influencer partnerships

Strong brand reputation is built not only on what you say about yourself, but also reinforced by who says it about you. Thought leadership and influencer partnerships can help you out with credibility, especially when they come from people that your audience already trusts.

Start posting insightful comments and content from experts and respectable figures in your industry. Choose those who strongly align not only with your brand, but with your brand values as well.

Strengthening reputation with community engagement

So many professionals either forget about this or don't care to put effort into it. Building a strong community around your company is key to positive brand reputation.

Whether you're responding to comments on social media, participating in local events, uplifting local communities, or simply creating spaces for honest conversations online, all of these moments add up.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of trust that sticks. People will remember even the smallest interactions and how you made them feel.

A good brand reputation management strategy is an asset

It should be part of your overall business strategy.

To make sure you'll never become a victim of online trolls or a simple misunderstanding blown out of proportion, you need to implement a practice where you monitor brand mentions, measure your standing, and protect your reputation.

Not sure where to start?

👉 Begin with an audit of your current reputation metrics, align your strategy with public relations and marketing efforts, and implement real-time monitoring.

The post Brand Reputation Management: How to Measure, Report, and Protect Your Brand appeared first on Prowly.

Collecting PR clippings is important if you want to stay up to date with the latest mentions you're interested in, track competitors, analyze your strategy, and report on progress to clients or stakeholders. And you will learn all that from this article.

What is PR clipping?

The method sounds more complex than it is, but it’s something you’ve probably done already plenty of times.

Definition of PR Clipping

PR clipping is a method of collecting mentions from media content. It often includes an analysis of public relations activities and the effectiveness of strategies in place. The process itself is often followed by creating a comprehensive media coverage report.

For example, your client is interested to see how a recent product announcement campaign performed.

By analyzing mentions, you can find out the audience such news reached, which social media platform had the most engagement, and whether all the activities around the campaign produced a good return on the investment.

5 reasons why press clippings are important

Take a look at why you should be collecting, tracking, and analyzing press clippings.

1️⃣ Media monitoring and analysis

The process plays a crucial role in monitoring the media, which allows brands to track how they're portrayed in all kinds of online media, print and broadcast media, including both online and offline sources. Without a PR clipping tool, it's nearly impossible to be able to catch all mentions of your brand and analyze them later.

Because of the expansion of the digital landscape, imagine going through online press clippings by hand – you'd probably have to hire a dedicated person (or a few people!) to do so.

It gets even worse with print media clippings or paywalled articles because you have to buy physical copies and subscriptions, and that ain't cheap. This especially concerns B2B PR, as more and more trade publications go behind paywalls.

With Prowly's Print Monitoring you can efficiently track press clippings without the hassle‚ it gives you access to full print articles AND lets you bypass online paywalls.

Instead of tracking mentions manually, you can do media monitoring with special tools and check the sentiment of your brand across various platforms, monitor your share of voice, see the estimated reach of your earned media, and so on.

2️⃣ Reputation management

To expand a bit more on the previous paragraph, careful evaluation of PR clippings across various media outlets is important for brand reputation management.

When you're focused on a specific platform, you might be missing out on your audience's sentiment in different places. With press clipping services, this becomes a click of a button rather than a tiresome task.

Media monitoring tools provide analysis such as sentiment, so you can see if there's an unusual spike in any kind of mentions or an increase in negative mentions (and if that happens, you know it's emergency showtime).

3️⃣ Competitor's media presence

How do you know if you're doing a great job if you're not monitoring what your competitors are doing? Monitoring your competitor’s press clips gives you insights into their strategy and performance. Yes, you can compare results to your own benchmarks, but knowing what's happening with your rivals is one of the most important benefits of collecting mentions.

What does it mean exactly?

👉 If a competitor has a really strong presence in niche outlets, and none in higher tier ones, maybe it's time to target those niche outlets as well or re-organize your strategy to prepare send-outs for other media your audience frequents.

4️⃣ Measuring PR ROI

Tracking press clippings allows you to measure your PR campaign's return on investment (PR ROI).

You sure don't need to be reminded of the media report definition, but it's important to recall how important measuring your strategy is. Whether you want to score a higher budget for the next campaign, or simply show off your work to stakeholders and clients, press clippings can help you do just that.

Advanced press clipping service companies have the technology to take a clipping and pull all the data about it.

Pro Tip: Additionally, if there is a group of clippings you're analyzing, it's a good idea to compare them to previous periods and show clear improvements, or simply assess them from a strategic standpoint aligned with the company goals.

5️⃣ Adaptation and strategy refinement

Are you reaching your goals effectively?

You can only see if there's room for improvement, or if your strategy is right where it's supposed to be by analyzing press clippings.

👉 The general consensus is to monitor them at least once a day, depending on the size of the brand you're working with.
👉 If things are rather stagnant, you can adjust your actions by analyzing statistics for each one of the press clippings.

Since advanced PR tools allow you to monitor mentions and analyze them in bulk, you no longer have to go one by one and do it all on your own.

And if you have more concerns regarding social listening techniques, you will learn all about building a strong social media monitoring strategy from this guide.

Press clipping purposes and benefits

This popular method offered by media monitoring services can help you increase brand awareness by analyzing each press clipping and adjusting your PR strategy accordingly.

With press clipping services offered by tools like Prowly, it's easy to stay in the know and make informed decisions on the fly.

Instantly identifying opportunities

Ever struggled to find exciting opportunities in the media?

With a media clipping service, you can quickly detect new trends and emerging talks across various channels. That way, you can either contribute or even initiate discussions that align with your brand's goals.

To put it in perspective, let's say you get an alert for a spike in mentions on Facebook.

Not all social media monitoring platforms are created equal, and some audiences are more sympathetic towards certain communities than others.

👉 If the buzz is already on Facebook, you can contribute to it there, and see if there's potential to create the same hype across different channels too.

Measuring campaign performance

First of all: 🚩 if a tool isn't able to give you PR-specific, industry-relevant numbers, then you might need to reconsider the online press clipping service you're using. 🚩

With a good press clipping tool, you'll be able to assess how your campaign is performing. After all, data-driven insights provide great results to keep doing what we're doing if it's working or shift our strategy when things are going south.

For example, Prowly's Media Monitoring can provide you with data-driven insights that you can analyze and use to build trust among stakeholders by providing them with timely and accurate updates on campaign performance.

The topic of data-driven PR is too important to simply glide through in this article. So, here's a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to measure your PR campaigns instead.

Acting in real-time

The ability to respond in real-time is the key to success. PR clipping services empower specialists with technology that systematically gathers and analyzes mentions scattered across various sources.

Whether you aim to be one step ahead if there is an impending crisis, or you simply want to be up to date with all mentions, collecting PR clippings is a great method to do so.

More so, acting in real-time based on PR clippings is not only a crisis response mechanism – it also serves as a tool to craft strategic initiatives to increase brand awareness.

Using data insights to optimize PR campaign strategies

Analyzing press clippings helps in understanding the customer's perspective and the audience you're interacting with. By using data-driven insights, you can adjust PR strategies and see how to improve them in the short term, or in the long run.

Prowly's Media Monitoring tracks mentions of any brand, competitor, or keyword, compiling them all in a comprehensive report with different charts.

That way, it's easier to visually analyze data and make informed decisions moving forward.

Adjusting strategy based on competitor's actions

One of the biggest purposes of PR clipping services is to monitor your competitors.

Knowing who's up to what is a great benchmark to use in evaluating your strategy. As you look over press clipping examples of your key rivals, you can gain a competitive edge quickly, especially if you know how to track media mentions effectively.

Then, it's all about aligning what you have seen and analyzing it with alignment to the company's goals:
👉 Is it brand awareness in general?
👉 Or maybe continuous work on increasing positive sentiment in one particular platform?

Whatever it is, PR clipping services are wonderful at evaluating what's happening in different brands.

Reporting back to clients and stakeholders

There's no better way to show others your work than in a comprehensive press clippings report. To demonstrate your value, press clipping services should have an additional option to create easy-to-read PR reports, so that you can create a presentation for whoever is in charge in a few clicks.

PR Reports allow you to automatically add important PR clippings and generate a coverage report with your work.

Whether your goal is to show that your strategy is in alignment with organizational goals, or simply build trust and transparency with data-driven insights, a clear PR clipping report is the best way to do it.

For example, by combining a media monitoring tool with PR clippings, you can track your campaign during a new season of the TV series your company has just launched and monitor the earned buzz surrounding it simultaneously.

➕ Bonus: blocking domains to see only the relevant clippings

Constantly getting mentions from an outlet you couldn’t care less about?

Blocking irrelevant outlets and excluding them from your statistics during Media Monitoring can help you ease the process.

Once you block a domain, it will not show up in any of your search queries, data or statistics.

Then, the clippings feature lets you choose which mentions are important to you right from the search query results, having them within reach for quick access. Here's what it looks like in Prowly:

How to make a media clipping with Prowly?

Prowly is a comprehensive tool with a full workflow for PR professionals. With all the features available, it also provides you with a media monitoring service to assist you in collecting press clippings.

1. Choose an article, blog post, mention, or any other clipping you like
2. Add it to a report and automatically pull the data you want to show
3. Finish making your report to show off your work

How to do PR clipping?

Take a look at what the process looks like from beginning to end. Here is the media clipping example that we will use to demonstrate how the process works.

1. Choose from one of the media monitoring services

First, find a tool that allows you to do PR clippings. For example, Prowly provides a free trial so you can try it out and see how easy it is to collect mentions automatically in less time.

2. Create a relevant query

Choose what you want to track. It can be a person, brand, competitor, or keyword – options here are limitless. Additionally, you can create an alert and get it sent to your mailbox whenever there's a new mention or an unusual spike of clippings with a negative sentiment so you can react to an impending crisis quickly.

3. Collect and analyze PR clipping results

Access an easy-to-read dashboard with all of the results. You can break it down by country, language, domain rank, and in dozens of other ways. If the tool has the option to view data in different types of graphs (Prowly does!), it makes it easier to understand what's going on.

4. Build an automatic report

Automatically transfer the PR clippings you found into a coverage report, where you can add a solid summary of all the data and metrics.

Putting all of your campaign accomplishments into a data-filled report will surely impress any client or stakeholder.

However, it's also important to use the relevant PR metrics that show the real value of your work. For example, we suggest stopping the use of UVPM or AVE alone and instead trying out their alternatives, including Share of Voice, sentiment, or media mentions.

Frequently asked questions

Who is PR clipping important for?

A clippings manager tool is important for every PR specialist tasked with social listening. Whether you're a solo freelancer, an agency, or an in-house team, collecting PR clippings allows us to adjust strategies on how we communicate with our audience.

Which tools can help with PR clipping?

There are several tools available on the market:

• Google Alerts
• Prowly
• Brand24
• Mentionlytics

What is an example of a press clipping?

So, what is a press clipping? It's simply a part of an article, a feature, or a mention from anywhere in the media. It's most commonly used when you need to make a report or a presentation for clients or stakeholders.

You can see three PR clippings in the "Highlights" section on the screenshot below.

How can I get clippings from paywalled articles?

The costs for monitoring paid publications can stack up. If you purchase separate subscriptions, the price can reach $1200 per outlet. Some monitoring tools offer pricey paywall-bypassing add-ons. Others make it a part of their regular offering–like Prowly, whose Print Monitoring includes tracking paywalled media.

Wrapping up

Thanks to technology, we don't need to do PR clipping manually anymore, but the idea of collecting mentions stays and isn't going anywhere.

From being able to see the sentiment of your activities in the media, to tracking competitors and keeping up with what's going on with your audience. Press clipping is an indispensable industry method for anyone who works in public relations.

Start a free trial with Prowly and track press clippings of brands, competitors, or any keywords you’re interested in.

The post Press Clippings Decoded: A Practical Guide to Mastering PR Exposure appeared first on Prowly.

The problem with monitoring social media performance is that there is so much you can track that it's easy to do too little or too much.

Analyzing social media campaign effectiveness is easier than you might think. This is why we've prepared a guide on the most important social media metrics you should track across platforms. While this guide is made for PR professionals, anyone can use these metrics for their own social media analysis.

Why PR pros need to care about social media metrics

Social media platforms have become the new battlefront for public relations. With more than five billion people on social media, being present online is no longer optional.

The role of public relations on social media has evolved from simply pitching journalists to covering media outlets in real time, tracking journalist engagement, and handling reputation management. In short, social is a major part of PR in 2025.

The difference between social media for marketing and PR is that marketing is primarily preoccupied with building a brand and an audience and selling a product or service directly (and indirectly).

Meanwhile, PR aims to spread stories about the brand to relevant journalists, content creators, and influencers and amplify the brand's reach online.

The most important social media metrics for PR

The social media KPIs that PR teams use differ slightly from those used for marketing. Here's how to measure social media performance for public relations and which metrics to use:

Engagement (beyond vanity metrics)

💡 Why it matters for PR: Unlike marketing, PR doesn't just chase likes and shares. The end goal is to build meaningful connections with the right people in your target audience and earn media attention for your brand.

Instead of going after the total count of likes, shares, and comments, PR teams should focus on where they are coming from.

For example, a high-profile journalist in your industry retweeting something you shared would be a big win for public relations. Meanwhile, 20 retweets from customers would be great for marketing but not so much for PR.

Use dedicated social media measurement tools that give precise analytics regarding your target audience. For example, Prowly lets you filter the media mentions of your brand based on specific audiences so you're only tracking metrics from relevant sources.

Also, track your engagement rate by dividing your total engagement (likes, comments, and shares) by your number of followers. Multiply by 100 and you'll get a percentage value you can use as a benchmark for future social media measures.

Brand mentions & sentiment analysis

💡 Why it matters for PR: Brand mentions happen when someone uses your brand's name on social media by tagging you or simply writing it out. Understanding brand mentions means finding out how people perceive your brand and it lets you proactively manage your reputation, resolve crises, and fine-tune your messaging.

The volume of mentions: How many times your brand gets mentioned across social media platforms. Typically, the more the better. However, you need to look beyond the numbers.

The context of mentions: In which way is someone mentioning you and what is it about? Did you just launch a new product that is making waves? Is a press release getting significant media coverage? Is there a full-on crisis brewing?

The sentiment of the mentions: When someone mentions your brand, it can be in a positive, neutral or negative sentiment. Doing this analysis manually is a chore, especially with many mentions rolling in. This is where sentiment analysis in tools, such as Prowly, come in handy.

Earned vs. owned social media impact

💡 Why it matters for PR: Public relations experts must differentiate between the content they control and the content that others create about them which spreads through social media organically.

To measure the organic performance of your PR-driven content, use one of the following metrics:

Social media reach: The number of unique users that have seen your content. Keeping your eye on this metric shows you how well content spreads organically, as opposed to paid methods.

Virality rate: When you divide the number of shares by the number of impressions and multiply the number by 100, you get this KPI. The higher the virality rate, the more people there are who share your content, which signals that your earned media efforts are paying off.

Organic vs. paid reach: As the name suggests, this is the ratio of your content's reach with and without promotion. If your content is making an impact without the need to boost it with cash, you're on a good track.

👉 Tip: Read this full guide on social media reputation to get a complete picture of your PR strategy.

Journalist & influencer interactions

💡 Why it matters for PR: Tracking who interacts with your content is more important than getting lots of reach from an audience that is irrelevant for your business or client.

Tracking this isn't too difficult, either.

Shares and mentions by journalists: Of the total mentions and shares, single out the portion that come from journalists. If they share your press releases, corporate statements, reports, or similar content, your PR efforts are paying off.

Influencer and thought leader engagement: If relevant experts are engaging with your brand's content, your PR storytelling is working.

Response rates to media inquiries: How quickly your PR team replies to journalists and handles crises on social media.

How to use social media metrics to improve PR strategies

Now that you've collected the right set of social media metrics, you can use them to guide your business or brand's PR strategies.

First, use this information to identify media trends and journalists' interests from social data. Aside from tracking the performance of your own content, you can use social media tracking and PR tools to find what journalists read and engage with.

The next point of action is to be prepared for social media crises. Thanks to media monitoring tools, you can detect PR crises early on. As soon as a monitoring tool detects a spike in mentions (especially those with negative sentiment), you can get notified so you can jump in. The same applies to your competitors' brands.

Lastly, you can use analytics to fine-tune your messaging. You can see if certain kinds of messaging strategies do not resonate with journalists or your target audience, allowing you to adjust on the fly.

P.S. Check out this guide on social media crisis management to fine-tune your strategy with a few practical tips.

PR tools vs. social media tools: why PR pros need both

To track all these metrics, you could use PR tools or social media management tools... Or both. Here's how they fare against each other.

So, which one do you need?

• A social media management platform is the better choice if you aim to manage daily social content, run ad campaigns, and engage with followers, with all the data tied into a social media report.
• PR software is more suitable if you need to secure media coverage, manage press relationships, and handle crisis communication.
• Many brands use both in tandem for a comprehensive digital and media strategy.

The great news is that you don't have to choose. With Prowly, you get all the features you need to manage your online presence in one app.

💡 Tip: Read this full guide on social media reputation to get a complete picture of your PR strategy.

Conclusion

There is no PR strategy in 2025 without using social media. The problem is that social media is uncharted territory for many PR professionals, requiring a lot of time and effort. However, you can manage your social media and PR presence with the right tools.

Try Prowly today for free to see how we can help you monitor, measure, and improve the social media presence of your business or clients.

The post Top Social Media Metrics to Track for PR Teams in 2025 appeared first on Prowly.

The key reason? You're not evaluating the success of your PR efforts.

And even when PR teams measure something, it's most often vanity metrics (such as AVE) rather than tangible ones such as ROI and their impact on a business's bottom line.

PR evaluation techniques help in-house PR teams and agencies accurately report on the results of their PR work, refine their strategies, demonstrate the value they provide, and improve overall communication with stakeholders.

Today, we show you everything you need to know about public relations evaluation.

What is PR evaluation?

PR evaluation is the process of assessing how impactful and effective a PR campaign is. For PR teams and businesses, evaluating PR efforts means understanding if the campaigns achieve their desired goals—for example, increased brand awareness, improved reputation, better brand sentiment, etc.

Over time, PR evaluation has evolved from outdated metrics such as AVE to modern performance PR KPIs focusing on actionable outcomes.

The role of PR evaluation is to help PR professionals shape their strategies, optimize their campaigns, and show justification for their budgets in front of clients or in-house management.

Two core techniques of PR evaluation

There are two main evaluation models if you're wondering how to evaluate a PR campaign. They are great in isolation, but you should use both public relations evaluation methods to evaluate your PR success.

Quantitative techniques

👉 These are quantifiable, measurable ways to describe the success of your PR work

The primary benefit of using quantitative methods is the ability to set benchmarks for performance and compare yourself against your own historical results.

Here are a few notable ones:

• Media monitoring and analysis: with tools such as Prowly, you can quantify and track your PR coverage with metrics such as share of voice or with sentiment analysis of every mention of your brand or campaign.
• Impressions and reach: popular PR metrics that can be grossly misinterpreted. Besides looking at numbers alone, you should pay attention to the relevance of the target audience consuming your content, the sentiment and message accuracy, and the overall engagement. In other words, don't look at impressions and reach in isolation.
• Website traffic and conversions: when you set up your analytics correctly (Google Analytics is a great free choice), you can easily track referral traffic from PR campaigns. This lets you determine how many people come to your website and convert as a consequence of a PR campaign.
• Social media analytics: likes, reactions, shares, and retweets are great starting points. However, you should look deeper into more meaningful metrics, like amplification ratios and the ROI from influencer marketing campaigns.

Qualitative Techniques

👉 Albeit not ultra-precise, these techniques are crucial for understanding PR evaluation.

Qualitative techniques let you describe your PR work's impact and its effects on a brand's reputation and real-world results, such as conversions and return on investment.

• Sentiment analysis: how someone feels about you when mentioning your brand or campaign: positive, neutral, or negative. Tools such as Prowly use AI to help you quickly analyze thousands of comments and mentions and determine their sentiment.
• Message penetration: how well key messages get to your target audience. You can measure it by assessing how often (and well) messages are included in media coverage and how prominent and consistent they are. Test your audience's awareness and recall with open-ended feedback methods for added evaluation.
• Stakeholder feedback: how managers, CEOs, other employees, and customers perceive your PR campaign work. You can use qualitative research methods such as open-ended surveys, focus groups, roundtables, and interviews.

Best practices for PR evaluation

Wondering how to evaluate your PR efforts? Each business, client, and brand is unique, but here are some tips that everyone can apply:

Set SMART goals

Make your goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.

For example: "Within three months of our product launch, we will secure at least 20 media mentions in industry-relevant publications, with at least 50% of them accurately reflecting our key brand message, to increase brand awareness and credibility."

Adjust your metrics to the campaigns you're working on

For example, if your main aim is to improve sentiment around your brand, set your goal to increase positive sentiments by X%. On the other hand, if the goal is to get direct conversions, set the conversion rate for your website/landing page as your North Star metric.

Combine quantitative and qualitative data for a complete campaign analysis

Numbers alone don’t always reveal the full picture, and neither do opinions. By blending quantitative metrics with qualitative insights, you gain a more comprehensive understanding of your campaign’s impact.

Monitor progress in real-time

Modern tools such as Prowly let you monitor campaigns as they happen, catching brand mentions and analyzing their sentiment. This keeps you agile and allows you to adjust your approach on the go.

Key evaluation metrics for PR professionals

Depending on the end goal of your PR campaigns, you can choose different sets of PR metrics to track.

These are some good examples:

• Output metrics: media coverage, published press releases, social shares.
• Outcome metrics: changes in brand awareness, audience sentiment, and behavior.
• Business impact metrics: revenue growth, lead generation, and reputation management.

For example, if you aim to spread awareness about a new product, you will mainly focus on impressions. If the goal is to improve brand reputation, you'll look at the sentiment for each mention. If you want to generate leads, traffic to the website will be one of your main KPIs.

Here are some of the key metrics to pay attention to:

Share of Voice (SoV)

One of the staples of measuring PR success, SoV helps you determine how much of the market share you're grabbing in comparison to your major competitors so you can assess the overall success of your PR campaigns and determine how much of an influence you have in the industry.

💡 P.S. Learn more about Share of Voice from this article.

Media impressions and reach

How well you can reach your total potential audience (your impressions) and unique viewers (your reach). Instead of taking these metrics at face value, consider how well you are reaching the right audience instead of just showing up in front of a large group of people.

💡 Learn more about using reach and impressions in PR from this article.

Website metrics

Look at your referral traffic to find out which campaigns drive people to your website and from which sources. Review your bounce and conversion rates to determine if the people coming from PR campaigns convert better than those landing on your website organically.

Social media engagement rates

Measure your overall impact on social platforms by reviewing your engagement rates, sentiment analysis for campaigns and mentions, and influencer ROI. These should help you paint a clearer picture of how people engage with you on social media.

Earned media value

The monetary value assigned to unpaid media coverage, such as press mentions, influencer endorsements, and social media shares. It helps PR pros translate campaign results into measurable financial terms.

💡 If you want to dive deeper into the PESO model, read these articles:
➖ What Is Earned Media? Definition, Benefits, Campaign Examples
➖ Maximizing PR Strategy with Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

Backlinks and domain authority

Using tools such as Semrush, you can evaluate how many backlinks come in from your PR campaigns and how they contribute to your overall online presence. The better the domain authority of your incoming backlinks, the more successful your PR campaigns are.

With Prowly you can group domains into Tiers. You can create six. Tier one contains the most important domains for you, and the sixth the least crucial ones. Moreover, you can add each mention to Tiers.

Tools for PR Evaluation

If you want to evaluate your PR campaign performance, you have various tools at your disposal. Depending on your goals, you can choose one of the following:

• Media monitoring tools: platforms such as Prowly can track your campaign/brand coverage and allow you to generate custom reports on specific metrics quickly.
• AI in predictive analytics: AI and machine learning can use historical performance and current market situations to predict trends and make sentiment analysis even more precise.
• Data dashboards: many tools (e.g., Whatagraph, Databox) let you centralize metrics across platforms in a single dashboard for an easy overview by all stakeholders, internally or externally.

💡 Tip: When choosing a media monitoring service, make sure it’s tailored to local media — for example, the UK market.

Emerging trends in PR evaluation

You don't have to be a PR research expert to determine where PR evaluation trends are headed.

These are the most important trends you should monitor in the upcoming months and years:

AI and machine learning

Artificial intelligence and machine learning models can help you enhance your data insights and give you predictive capabilities. For example, AI can tell you why a particular campaign worked well and, in light of market conditions, what you can do to replicate those results in the same time next year.

The focus on ESG metrics

Sustainability will be pivotal in the years to come, which is why it should be one of your primary objectives in public relations campaigns. ESG campaigns build trust and credibility, prevent greenwashing, and improve brand reputation.

Integrated marketing analytics

In the future, PR will fit into the larger landscape of marketing and sales goals. In other words, PR should not work in isolation. Instead, it should be considered as a spoke connecting to the main marketing hub and overall goals.

Authentic engagement

Instead of looking at superficial metrics such as impression or reach, consider looking at authentic interactions with your brand. For example, brand mentions along with overall sentiment for those mentions.

Wrapping up

PR evaluation is more than looking at a few metrics on a dashboard and calling it a day. To understand your brand and PR performance, you and your team must consider a wide range of qualitative and quantitative metrics and consider how PR fits into your overall marketing, brand and business strategy.

Prowly can help with a suite of tools for measuring your PR efforts and understanding what is happening with your campaigns in real time.

Aside from trying out Prowly for free, you can read our blog for more insights on PR campaigns and how to measure and improve them.

The post PR Evaluation: Top Metrics and Tools to Use in 2025 appeared first on Prowly.