How Should Small Businesses Measure Whether Their PR Is Working?
By Jordan Baker, Founder of Fair Public Relations and former UK national journalist
One of the most difficult things about PR is that the most important results do not always move at the same speed.
You can secure an excellent national newspaper article without seeing an immediate jump in sales.
You can have a month where several journalists are actively interested in your business but nothing has actually been published yet.
A piece of coverage might generate a valuable backlink, while another article in a much bigger publication mentions your company prominently but does not link at all.
Someone may discover your business through a newspaper article, Google your founder three weeks later, read another piece of coverage, follow you on LinkedIn and eventually become a customer two months after that.
Which part gets the credit?
This is why I think small businesses need to be careful about measuring PR through one number.
Article count matters.
Publication quality matters.
Backlinks can matter.
Website traffic can matter.
Journalist interest matters.
Credibility matters.
Commercial outcomes obviously matter.
But none of those should be viewed entirely in isolation.
The more useful question is: is the campaign producing the kinds of media results and wider signals that support the reason we started doing PR in the first place?
That requires slightly more judgement than simply counting how many press releases were sent.
How do you know whether PR is actually working?
Start by going back to the objective.
If the original goal was to make your founder more recognisable as an expert, I would look closely at the quality, relevance and consistency of the articles in which that founder appears.
If the objective was to strengthen a new website through digital PR, editorial backlinks and the quality of the referring publications become much more important.
If the business wanted product awareness, I would look at whether journalists are actually featuring the product in relevant editorial environments.
If the purpose was credibility, I would assess whether there is now a stronger body of independent media coverage appearing around the company, founder or specialist subject.
If the purpose was direct ticket sales for an event, we may be able to measure commercial activity much more precisely.
This approach is broadly consistent with modern communications measurement guidance. AMEC's Integrated Evaluation Framework starts with organisational and communications objectives before moving through outputs, audience responses, outcomes and eventual organisational impact. In other words, measurement should begin with what you were trying to achieve rather than collecting impressive-looking numbers after the event.
For a small business, I would keep that philosophy but make it practical.
What did we want PR to do?
What evidence have we produced?
What is happening because of it?
And is that enough to justify continuing?
What counts as a genuine PR result?
For me, a result is something that has actually happened.
An article was published.
A journalist quoted the expert.
A founder was interviewed.
A product appeared in an editorial feature.
A radio or television interview aired.
A relevant trade publication featured the business.
Those are outcomes we can point to.
A pitch is activity.
A journalist saying they may be interested is progress.
An interview scheduled for next week is promising.
A press release sitting with twenty journalists is not coverage yet.
That distinction is extremely important when businesses assess an agency.
There should absolutely be visibility around work in progress. At Fair PR, our current Standard PR service includes a client portal showing campaign activity, journalist opportunities, pitching and published coverage, alongside fortnightly progress updates covering media interest and what we are working on next. Fair Public Relations
But activity should not be dressed up as a result.
If six months pass and an agency's reporting consists entirely of how many emails it sent, I would want to know why.
What should be happening by month three?
I would not treat month three as a magical deadline where a campaign either passes or fails.
PR simply does not work that neatly.
Some stories publish almost immediately. Others can take weeks or months. Fair's own current guidance says PR often starts to build properly over months three to six.
But after roughly three months, I do expect to understand the campaign.
For many Fair clients, I would hope to see a handful of published articles and/or credible pieces moving through the pipeline. I want to see considerable pitching activity, often hundreds of journalist approaches across the period depending on the campaign, and I want evidence that at least some journalists are engaging with what we are sending them.
I also want the strategic picture to be clearer than it was on day one.
Which angles have worked?
Which ones have not?
Which publications are showing interest?
Do journalists respond more strongly to the founder, the expertise, the product, the customer stories or something else?
Have we changed the way we frame the campaign because the market has told us something?
That is valuable information.
A campaign where absolutely nothing has been learned after three months worries me almost as much as a campaign with no articles.
Client engagement is part of measurement too
This may seem unusual because it is not a media metric, but I absolutely look at client cooperation when assessing a campaign.
Is the client engaged?
Are they enthusiastic?
Are they reasonably quick?
Are they giving us the information we need?
Are they open-minded when we explain that journalists are interested in one subject but not another?
Can the expert answer questions?
Are photographs available?
Can we actually get the founder onto an interview?
PR is collaborative.
Fair's current terms explicitly state that delays in providing information, approvals, spokesperson availability or expert responses can reduce campaign activity and cause media opportunities to be missed.
If there is strong journalist interest but the client repeatedly prevents us from converting it, I would diagnose that very differently from a campaign where journalists simply do not care about anything we offer.
Is the number of articles important?
Yes.
I do think volume matters.
Sometimes people become so anxious about avoiding "vanity metrics" that they go too far the other way and pretend quantity is irrelevant.
If the purpose of an ongoing PR campaign is to build a meaningful body of independent media visibility, then repeatedly getting published is useful.
At Fair PR, once a suitable campaign has found its rhythm, we generally look for something in the region of two to four pieces of coverage a month as a reasonable guide rather than a guarantee. That is also how the current Standard PR page describes established campaign momentum.
But I would never assess that number without looking at the coverage itself.
Four useful articles are very different from four meaningless ones.
One brilliant article versus ten weak articles
If you forced me to choose, I would take relevant, credible coverage every time.
But I also think the premise can be slightly misleading.
A strong PR campaign should ideally build both quality and consistency.
Suppose an HR consultancy gets one detailed feature in an influential HR publication read by the exact people who buy its services. That could be far more commercially useful than several incidental mentions on websites with almost no connection to its target audience.
Equally, if the goal is to build a strong online footprint around a founder's expertise, one article in twelve months may simply not be enough to create the visibility the client wants.
The correct question is therefore not:
How many articles did we get?
It is:
How much relevant, credible editorial evidence are we building around this business?
How do you judge the quality of a publication?
Fame is only one consideration.
I look at whether the publication is genuinely editorial.
I look at its relevance.
I look at who reads it.
I look at the context in which the client appears.
I look at whether the business is prominently and accurately positioned.
I consider whether the publication is nationally recognised, internationally relevant, highly influential within a specialist sector or particularly useful locally.
A specialist publication can be exceptionally valuable.
Imagine a technology supplier selling exclusively to chief information officers. A highly respected IT publication may produce much more relevant commercial credibility than a brief mention in a general-interest newspaper read by millions of people who will never buy the service.
That does not make national coverage unimportant.
It means relevance changes value.
Why I do not obsess over potential reach
Huge reach figures look lovely in reports.
"Potential audience: 92 million."
What does that actually mean?
It certainly does not mean 92 million people read the article.
A theoretical audience figure may describe the broader size of a publication or network. It tells you very little about how many people encountered one specific piece of coverage, how much attention they paid or whether they were remotely relevant to the business.
This is one reason I think modern PR measurement needs to move beyond enormous headline numbers.
AMEC makes a similar point in its measurement guidance, warning that activity-based counts and impression-style figures without context can become vanity metrics rather than meaningful evidence of effectiveness.
I would rather show a client ten genuinely relevant articles than tell them they achieved a theoretical audience of half the planet.
Advertising Value Equivalent is another metric I would avoid
AVE attempts to estimate the supposed advertising value of editorial coverage by comparing it with the cost of buying advertising space.
I think it is very old-fashioned and not especially useful.
The modern measurement profession takes an even firmer view. The 2025 Barcelona Principles 4.0 explicitly say invalid metrics such as Advertising Value Equivalents should not be used to represent communications value and recommend measuring outcomes and impact instead.
It also misses what makes earned media distinctive.
An editorial quote is not simply a free advert.
A journalist independently decided that your expertise was useful enough to include.
That credibility is precisely why comparing the article with the price of an advertisement feels so unsatisfactory.
Should backlinks form part of PR measurement?
For some clients, absolutely.
If a client comes to us specifically wanting to build a stronger online authority profile, I am conscious of which publications historically include editorial links and the strength and relevance of those publications.
One Less Thing is a useful Fair PR example.
During the first 12 months of that campaign, 38 published articles were recorded and 35 contained editorial backlinks. Over the same period, the site's Moz Domain Authority increased from 0 to 19. The case study explicitly describes Domain Authority as a third-party SEO metric rather than a Google ranking factor, which is an important distinction.
That is how I like to discuss this area.
We can measure the links.
We can measure third-party SEO metrics.
We can observe changes.
We should not turn those observations into promises about Google rankings.
Google itself says its ranking systems use many different factors and signals, so no sensible PR agency should imply that obtaining one link from one publication mathematically guarantees a particular search position.
What about dofollow and nofollow links?
Historically, digital PR conversations could become extremely focused on whether a backlink was followed or nofollowed.
I still understand why clients care, particularly where link acquisition is a campaign objective.
But I would not let that binary overwhelm the wider assessment of media value.
Google treats nofollow as a link qualification and has described it as a hint within its systems rather than the old-fashioned idea of an absolute dead end. It also provides separate attributes for sponsored and user-generated links. Google for Developers
The publication, editorial context and credibility of the coverage all matter too.
A significant article does not suddenly become worthless because the publisher did not give you precisely the link attribute you wanted.
Can PR increase website traffic?
Yes, but again, context matters.
An article containing a prominent link may produce measurable referral traffic.
A product feature can send readers directly to a product page.
A founder interview might cause people to search the founder's name rather than click a link.
A print article may generate no digital referral data whatsoever and still be valuable.
Businesses can use analytics platforms to examine referral traffic and trends in branded search, where those data are available.
But attribution should be treated cautiously.
If website traffic increases after a major article, that is interesting evidence.
It is not always proof that PR was the only reason.
Can you measure PR enquiries and sales?
Sometimes.
The cleanest campaigns are those where there is an obvious transaction tied to the coverage.
With our 5th & Mad events work, for example, people were reading media coverage about specific ticketed events and then had somewhere to go to buy tickets. That made the commercial path much easier to observe.
Most small-business PR is not that neat.
Fair is a PR agency rather than a performance-marketing agency. Our primary job is earned exposure, credibility, brand visibility and wider online authority.
Those things can absolutely support enquiries and sales.
But clients do not always tell us where each customer came from, and customers themselves frequently experience several touchpoints before buying.
I would rather admit that than invent a precise ROI number we cannot defend.
Ask customers how they found you
Small businesses can improve attribution themselves.
Add an optional question to your enquiry form.
Ask during sales calls.
Track referral traffic.
Use campaign-specific landing pages where appropriate.
Keep an eye on branded searches.
Ask new clients whether they saw you in the press.
None of these methods is perfect, but together they can reveal patterns.
One warning: be careful with website "lead" numbers.
A form submission event may include spam, existing customers, suppliers or irrelevant enquiries.
Calling every form completion a PR-generated sales lead can massively overstate commercial impact.
What about credibility and reputation?
This is where PR becomes harder to squeeze into a spreadsheet.
If a prospective client searches your founder and finds repeated commentary in respected publications, does that make them more comfortable signing a contract?
Quite possibly.
Can I tell you the exact monetary value of that confidence?
Usually not.
Credibility is nevertheless real.
It can show up in sales conversations.
Clients may mention having seen the business somewhere.
Journalists may start approaching the founder directly.
Partners may recognise the name.
The company may look more established because independent publications have repeatedly treated its people as useful sources.
Personally, I think credibility has become an even more important PR outcome than simple awareness.
Being seen matters.
Being trusted and understood for something specific matters more.
Can PR help with Google, GEO and AI search visibility?
Potentially, but this is an area where agencies need to be disciplined about what they claim.
Earned media can create independent pages mentioning a company, founder, product or expertise.
It can create links.
It can expand the body of third-party information available online.
Those are observable outputs.
What I would not promise is that a specific number of articles will make Google rank a page first or force ChatGPT, Google AI or another system to cite a company.
Search and AI systems make their own decisions.
Even Google's spam policies explicitly prohibit attempts to manipulate both conventional rankings and generative AI responses through abusive tactics.
Our job is to create legitimate earned-media evidence around a client.
That is very different from guaranteeing the behaviour of an external search or AI system.
How should you review PR over three to six months?
I would look at four layers.
First, activity. Has meaningful work actually happened?
Second, journalist response. Are people interested?
Third, published results. Is coverage appearing, and is it good enough?
Fourth, strategic and commercial relevance. Is the campaign building the thing the client wanted?
By month three, I want enough evidence to understand the trajectory.
By months three to six, I would expect the picture to become considerably clearer.
Sometimes that means accelerating what works.
Sometimes it means changing the strategy.
And sometimes it means deciding not to continue.
A simple PR measurement scorecard
This is an illustrative example, not a scientific formula:
| Objective | Metric | Evidence | Review frequency | What it may tell us | Possible next action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Build founder authority | Relevant expert articles | Published coverage | Monthly | Is the founder becoming associated with the right subjects? | Expand strongest commentary themes |
| Strengthen online authority | Editorial backlinks and referring publications | Coverage URLs / SEO tools | Monthly or quarterly | Are credible external references increasing? | Prioritise suitable link-friendly media without guaranteeing links |
| Reach target buyers | Publication and audience relevance | Media review | Monthly | Are we appearing where decision-makers actually read? | Adjust publication mix |
| Increase journalist familiarity | Incoming requests and repeat journalist contact | Campaign records | Monthly | Are journalists beginning to recognise the source? | Deepen useful relationships |
| Support enquiries | Referral traffic, branded searches, customer attribution | Analytics and CRM | Quarterly | Is PR contributing to discovery? | Improve tracking and landing pages |
| Improve strategy | Response rate by angle | Journalist feedback and pitching data | Monthly | Which stories actually gain traction? | Drop weak angles and expand strong ones |
The exact scorecard should follow the business objective.
What should a good agency report include?
I want clients to understand the campaign, not merely receive a list of links.
A good update should explain what has been published, what is being pitched, what journalists are showing interest in, what is still pending, what has not worked, what is coming up in the PR calendar and why the agency is choosing particular stories and publications.
Clients should know the strategy.
They should be able to see why a piece of content exists.
They should know whether something is gaining traction.
If the agency has materially changed its thinking, explain why.
Fair currently provides fortnightly progress updates plus a monthly account call, while the portal shows campaign activity and published coverage.
The exact reporting model will vary between agencies.
Transparency should not.
When should you change the PR strategy?
When the evidence tells you to.
If one type of expert commentary consistently gets journalist interest and another receives nothing, learn from it.
If the founder story is working better than company announcements, lean into the founder.
If national journalists have little interest but specialist media respond strongly, reconsider whether the trade audience is actually the better objective.
If the client is blocking the successful angles because they only want to promote something journalists do not care about, have that conversation.
PR strategy should respond to evidence.
It should not stubbornly follow the proposal written before a single journalist had seen the campaign.
A campaign where we decided to stop
We once worked with a new dating app.
Our proposed strategy was broader than simply pitching the app.
We wanted to use a relationship-coach ambassador for expertise-led coverage and develop an interesting founder story around why the business had been created.
That gave us content.
The client later decided they wanted the campaign to focus much more directly on promoting the app itself as a new dating app.
The difficulty was that it was very new, had relatively few reviews and few downloads. Simply announcing another new dating app was, in our view, a considerably weaker media proposition.
We explained that.
For around two months we followed the direction the client wanted. We had a few bites and some coverage, but nothing I felt justified becoming complacent.
When the next renewal point arrived, we had an honest conversation.
If they were not prepared to return to the expertise and storytelling strategy we believed had the stronger editorial potential, I thought there were other marketing channels that might be a better place for their money.
We stopped working together.
I think that was absolutely the right decision.
When is it fair to say PR is not delivering enough?
When there is neither enough result nor enough convincing evidence that results are developing.
I can tolerate delayed publication if journalists are clearly engaged.
I can tolerate a strategy changing because we have learned something.
I can tolerate an angle failing.
What concerns me is persistent indifference.
If you have repeatedly tested credible ideas with appropriate journalists and there is almost no interest, that is information.
And if articles are being secured but, over a sensible period, they are not contributing anything meaningful to the client's real goals, that deserves a conversation too.
Businesses should not keep paying indefinitely because somebody tells them "PR takes time".
PR does take time.
That is not the same as PR being beyond accountability.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate the return on investment from PR?
Start with the objectives you set before the campaign. Measure published media outputs, relevant audience exposure, referral activity and attributable commercial outcomes where possible. Avoid inventing a financial value for outcomes you cannot credibly attribute.
How many articles should a PR agency secure each month?
There is no universal number and earned coverage cannot be guaranteed. At Fair PR, many suitable campaigns may reach roughly two to four pieces of coverage per month once momentum is established, but results vary according to the client, subject, timing and journalist interest. Fair Public Relations
Is one national newspaper article better than several trade articles?
Not automatically. A specialist article reaching the exact people who buy from you may be extremely valuable. Assess relevance and substance alongside publication size.
Does media coverage need a backlink?
No. Links can be useful, particularly in digital PR campaigns, but a strong editorial mention, interview or feature can still have credibility and visibility value without one.
How long should I give PR?
I generally think in months rather than weeks. By around three months I want a clear view of activity, journalist interest and emerging results, while many campaigns become properly established over months three to six.
Should PR increase website traffic?
It can, especially where online coverage contains useful links, but not every valuable article produces measurable referral traffic.
Can PR generate direct sales?
Yes, in some campaigns. In others, PR contributes indirectly to trust and discovery rather than creating a clean last-click sale.
What if my PR agency is not getting results?
Ask what has been pitched, what journalists have said, what has changed strategically and what the agency proposes doing next. If there is no meaningful result or evidence of traction over a sensible period, it may be time to alter the strategy or provider.
So, How Should a Small Business Measure PR?
Measure what matters to the business.
Count the coverage, but read it too.
Track links, but do not confuse them with guaranteed rankings.
Look at journalist interest before the article appears.
Watch the wider online footprint.
Track commercial signals where attribution is genuinely possible.
And demand honesty from your agency when something is not working.
PR should not be judged by one enormous reach number.
It should be judged by whether, over time, it is creating credible, relevant and commercially useful visibility around the things your business wants to become known for.
That is the result I care about.
Written by Jordan Baker
Founder of Fair Public Relations and former UK national journalist
Jordan Baker is the founder of Fair Public Relations and a former UK national journalist with more than a decade of experience in PR and media relations. He writes about PR measurement, earned media, journalist outreach, expert positioning and how small businesses can build credible long-term visibility.
