EARNED MEDIA METRICS: WHAT WE MEASURE AND WHY
Earned media coverage. What’s not to love?
Positive media coverage helps to build brand awareness, affinity and credibility. It’s a valuable tool for reaching both target and broader audiences. Whether that’s through niche publications, broadcast channels or high ranking news sites and lifestyle publications depends on the goals of your campaign and the nature of your brand. Get your media strategy right, and you can benefit from exposure that aligns with your brand positioning. In a subtle and nuanced way, of course.
What does success look like?
Measuring the success of your earned media is not always easy, especially because it is typically a part of a longer-term strategy and not a short term win. This means you decide what success looks like for your brand in today’s media landscape.
Are your earned media efforts mainly geared towards brand awareness? Are you targeting key publications? Do you have a message to communicate, or a story to amplify?
In order to plan activity and gauge success, it’s important to determine which goals are realistic, achievable and measurable through earned media and which will be achieved and measured through paid, shared and owned channels.
Earned media is exactly that. Earned.
As PRs know only too well, you can’t predict exactly where your story will land. You don’t control the narrative, you can’t dictate what is written and whether an article includes a link. Nor will it sing the praises of your incredible product offering and brand ethos. Sadly, but rightly so! If we retained complete creative control on all the articles published, it wouldn’t be “earned”.
Setting a benchmark.
While our clients use a suite of tools that may include analytics to monitor site traffic and performance, brand tracking to measure sentiment and impact, we focus our efforts on providing a standard set of metrics specific to an individual earned media project, or series of projects.
This helps us to set a benchmark and offer guarantees to our clients, while identifying strong performing campaigns and subject matters. It means that what we do, what we promise and what we deliver is completely transparent and measurable.
So what do we measure?
We use CoverageBook to measure the performance of every project. This software provides a plethora of metrics for us to set clear benchmarks to track the success of a story.
Number of ‘hits’ or pieces of coverage
Looking at the total number of pieces obtained for a story can be a very clear cut way of measuring success— and can be a satisfying number to report on! Our team will collate all digital and broadcast media that cover a story. Presented with screenshots, links to individual coverage, and its accompanying audience metrics.
Client and campaign goals will vary here. Some brands may want to reach the widest audience possible with a story that can access a wide range of consumers. If you’re running a campaign for a pizza brand for example, a research-led story about Americans’ favorite way to eat pizza is as relevant to People.com and MarthaStewart.com as it is Yahoo, MSN, Mashed, Food and Wine and Kvue Austin, Texas.
Other brands may want to craft a narrative targeting more niche publications, or publications and verticals focussing on money, lifestyle, or health and wellness. Our survey story for CeraVe about ‘baby’s first year’ landed extensive coverage on parenting sites. While a recent campaign for Exodus Travel generated coverage across high ranking national and regional news sites as well as travel publications.Estimated coverage views
CoverageBook’s algorithm looks at a site’s average monthly viewership and cross-references that number with a variety of factors. These include whether or not the article was featured on the homepage and how many articles that site publishes on average as that influences how quickly an article will fall from the homepage and limit potential visibility. It also takes into consideration a site’s domain authority score.
Note, we’re talking views not reach here. While we do include monthly reach numbers, estimated coverage views can give us a much clearer picture of how many people from a site’s monthly readership actually read an article. While it’s useful to consider a site’s overarching size and traffic - it is not a key metric nor is it often used as a KPI by our clients.
Here is a useful ‘coverage views’ explainer by CoverageBookNumber of links from coverage
As PR professionals know, getting an article to link back directly to a brands’ homepage is a major win for any editorial story featuring your client — but it’s not an easy placement to ensure.
Each publication has their own style guide and SEO milestones they need to achieve so it’s more likely editors will find other relevant articles from their site to link within the story to keep readers engaging with their site. Or, depending on where a story broke first, editors will link back to a story’s original posting for readers to get more information. This is why we recommend to clients partnering with SWNS Media and 72Point to create a landing page or blog post featuring our findings together to position them as the source for the research and encourage publishers to include a backlink where they may not have otherwise.Domain Authority
We all have different ways of quantifying what makes a great hit, and depending on what kind of goals you’ve set for this campaign — there are different ways to assess success. We prefer to use Domain Authority (DA) to get an inside look on how a site will perform in terms of SEO value.
Domain Authority is a score from 1 to 100, indicating how likely a certain website or page will appear on the first page of Google when consumers enter key words into their search engine.
National outlets like the New York Times, Yahoo! News and FOX, traditionally live in the 85-95 range, thanks to their consistent viewership and article output. But it’s not uncommon for local outlets and other sites that some would normally consider “niche” or “mid-tier” to score somewhere between a 60-85 domain authority score — which is still high enough to create impactful SEO avenues for consumers. CoverageBook reports any DA score with a 60 or higher is likely to appear on the first page of Google.Social shares and engagement
CoverageBook reports 60% of all coverage isn’t shared online — which can make accessing the thousands of people who find their news on social media a bit challenging. With earned editorial content, however, we can predict our stories will receive the same SEO practices they would use for any quality story on their site, including homepage exposure and social media posts to drive website traffic.
If social media engagement is a primary goal for your campaign — it’s important to set realistic expectations around the story you're trying to create. Creating a buzz worthy story requires a drive to create conversation — regardless of the topic, data-led storytelling is the most effective way to put yourself in the driver’s seat of those conversations.Broadcast views
While we guarantee online mentions with all of our stories, it’s not uncommon for our content to appear on local and national outlets across the United States. Local broadcast channels provide a great pathway of exposure to brands looking to create meaningful conversations among consumers.
We monitor viewership figures using our broadcast monitoring service. The metric is calculated through a variety of factors – primarily through the station’s overall viewership, the market it played in, and the time that it aired. Broadcast figures are included with digital coverage metrics in your final report at the end of a project.
Utilizing AI for campaign planning and monitoring
We use Signal AI before, during and after projects. It is a powerful social listening tool to help our team identify key topics that might perform well in the earned media space. As well as timing for particular stories to help campaigns perform well. During a campaign, we are able to easily track which publications are mentioning your brand through the use of our data-led news story. After the campaign, we can track increases in brand awareness and the share of voice.
Many times clients choose to work with us for multiple projects in a year. Building brand awareness and paving pathways for SEO growth is a major goal for many of the brands we partner with. To achieve this goal effectively, we release multiple stories to increase media mentions throughout a particular time frame.
Measuring the success of an individual story can provide great insight into the power of data-driven storytelling and its ROI for a brand, but when it comes to improving awareness long-term, tools like Signal AI help us to monitor a brand’s share of voice across all or key media to examine a client’s growth throughout their partnership with us.
Like to know more? Check out our FAQs page, or get in touch with the team, we’d love to hear from you.
Alexandra Flowers
Media Campaign Analyst, 72Point Inc.