Measurement · Jan 28, 2026 · 6 min read · by the Pressfold team

Measuring PR beyond vanity metrics

Open most PR reports and you'll find big, round, comforting numbers: tens of millions of impressions, enormous "potential reach", an advertising-value-equivalent figure with a currency symbol in front of it. They look impressive and they mean almost nothing. If we're going to ask clients to fund data-story campaigns, we owe them measurement that survives a sceptical CFO.

Why reach numbers mislead

"Potential reach" usually means the total monthly traffic of every site that mentioned you, summed up — as if every visitor read your story. Advertising value equivalent invents a number by pricing earned coverage as if you'd bought ads. Both inflate by orders of magnitude and neither tells you whether anyone acted. They persist because they're flattering, not because they're useful.

What we actually track

• Pickups, listed individually. The real URLs, the publication, the date. A short, honest list beats an aggregate every time.
• Quality of placement. A relevant trade title that your buyers read outranks a generalist site with bigger raw traffic.
• Links earned and their context. Whether they're inside real editorial copy and pointing somewhere that matters.
• Branded search lift. A sustained rise in people searching your name after a campaign is one of the cleanest signals coverage worked.
• Referral behaviour. Not just visits from coverage, but whether those visitors did anything once they arrived.

Tie it to a goal set in advance

The honest version of measurement starts before the campaign, not after. If the goal was awareness, branded search and quality pickups are the scoreboard. If it was authority for a specific page, the links and their context are. Deciding what counts after you see the results is how vanity metrics creep back in — you reach for whatever number happened to be large.

Be willing to report a miss

Not every campaign lands. The data might be flatter than hoped, or the news cycle swallows it. A measurement system worth anything has to be able to say "this one underperformed, here's why, here's what we'd change." A report that can only ever show success isn't measurement — it's marketing aimed at you. We'd rather lose an argument than launder a result.