One of the most common questions I get from clients, usually about three or four weeks into a campaign, is some version of "so... is it working?" And I genuinely love that question, because it tells me they care about outcomes, not just activity. But it also tells me something else: that our industry has done a pretty poor job of teaching people what "working" actually looks like when it comes to PR.
The truth is, measuring PR has been a mess for a long time. Not because it's unmeasurable, but because too many agencies have had a vested interest in keeping the metrics vague. When your measurement framework is fuzzy enough, anything can look like a win. A mention in an obscure trade publication nobody reads? Success. A story that completely misrepresents your product? Still counts. A beautifully placed feature in exactly the right outlet that drives zero action because the timing was off? Somehow also a success.
I think clients deserve better than that, and I think most of them know it. So let's talk about what actually matters when you're trying to figure out whether your PR investment is delivering.
The metric that refuses to die
If you've ever received a PR report that includes something called AVE, or Advertising Value Equivalency, I need you to know something important: it was formally declared invalid in 2010. The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, known as AMEC, established the Barcelona Principles that year, and one of the central declarations was that AVE is not a legitimate measure of PR value. That was sixteen years ago.
And yet it keeps showing up. I still see it in competitor reports, in pitch decks, in case studies. The reason is simple: AVE makes agencies look good. It takes the column inches or airtime your coverage occupied and multiplies it by what that space would have cost as paid advertising, then often applies an arbitrary multiplier on top because editorial coverage is supposedly more credible than an ad. The result is an impressively large number that means almost nothing.
It doesn't tell you whether the coverage was positive or negative. It doesn't tell you whether the right people saw it. It doesn't tell you whether your key messages landed. It certainly doesn't tell you whether anyone picked up the phone or visited your website as a result. It's a vanity metric dressed up in a spreadsheet, and if your agency is still using it as a primary measure of success, that's worth a conversation.
Six signals that actually tell you something
So if AVE is out, what should you be paying attention to? Over the years, working across dozens of campaigns with clients ranging from early-stage startups to established national brands, I've landed on six signals that, taken together, give you a genuinely useful picture of whether your PR is doing its job.
Message accuracy. This one sounds basic, but it's foundational. When a journalist writes about your company, are they getting the story right? Are your key messages coming through in the coverage, or is the narrative drifting into territory you didn't intend? A piece in the country's biggest outlet is worth very little if it fundamentally misrepresents what you do. We track this for every piece of coverage we secure, and it's the first thing I look at before anything else.
Audience relevance. Not all coverage is created equal, and the outlet matters enormously. A feature in a niche industry publication that lands directly on the desks of your target customers can be worth far more than a passing mention in a mainstream outlet where your audience makes up less than one percent of the readership. We always ask: did this coverage reach the people who actually make buying decisions for this product or service?
Coverage quality. There's a spectrum between a one-line mention buried in a round-up and a dedicated feature article with quotes, imagery, and a link back to your website. Both count as "coverage" in a technical sense, but they're not remotely equivalent in terms of impact. We look at placement prominence, whether you're the focus or a footnote, whether there are direct quotes, and whether the piece includes a clear path back to you.
Website traffic. This is where PR starts to connect with the numbers your marketing team already watches. When a major piece of coverage lands, you should see a corresponding spike in direct and referral traffic. If you're consistently getting coverage but your analytics remain flat, that's a signal worth investigating, because it usually means either the coverage isn't reaching the right audience or the story isn't compelling enough to drive curiosity.
Inbound enquiries. The most satisfying metric of all, and the one that tends to make finance teams pay attention. When someone contacts you and says "I saw you in the Herald" or "I read about you on Stuff," that's PR doing exactly what it's supposed to do. We encourage all our clients to ask new enquiries where they heard about the company, because that simple question builds a direct line between coverage and commercial outcomes. Our work with Evnex is a good example of this, where consistent, long-term PR has created a steady drumbeat of inbound interest that compounds over time.
Share of voice. This one is particularly useful in competitive markets. Share of voice measures how much of the total media conversation in your category belongs to you versus your competitors. If you're a challenger brand trying to establish credibility alongside larger, better-funded rivals, watching your share of voice grow month over month is one of the most meaningful indicators that your positioning work is paying off.
No single one of these signals tells the full story on its own. But when you look at them together, patterns emerge quickly, and you get a much more honest picture than any single number could provide.
The 90-day rule
I mentioned earlier that clients often ask whether things are working around the three or four week mark, and while I understand the impulse, I always have to be honest about timing. PR is not paid advertising. You can't turn it on like a tap and expect instant, measurable results from day one.
The first few weeks of any campaign are typically spent on groundwork: refining your messaging, building journalist relationships, identifying the right angles, and pitching stories that may take weeks or even months to come to fruition. A journalist might love your story today but not have space in their editorial calendar until next quarter. A producer might flag your founder as someone they want to interview, then wait for the right news hook to make it timely.
This is why I tell every new client to give a campaign at least 90 days before making any serious judgements about whether it's delivering. That's not me buying time, it's just the reality of how earned media works. If you want to understand the mechanics of this in more detail, we wrote a whole piece on how long PR takes to deliver results that walks through the typical timeline.
That said, 90 days doesn't mean you should be sitting in the dark for three months. A good agency will be giving you regular updates on activity, pipeline, and early signals throughout that period. You should know what's been pitched, what's in progress, and what's coming up. The results may take time to land, but the work should be visible from week one.
When to worry, and when to be patient
So how do you tell the difference between a campaign that's building momentum and one that's genuinely underperforming? Here are some honest guidelines.
Be patient if: you're getting positive journalist responses but stories haven't published yet, your agency is actively pitching and can show you the pipeline, early coverage is accurate and well-placed even if the volume is still low, or you're in a complex or niche industry where journalist education takes time.
Start asking harder questions if: you're past the 90-day mark with little to no coverage, the coverage you're getting consistently misses your key messages, your agency can't clearly articulate what they're pitching and to whom, you're seeing no movement in website traffic or inbound enquiries despite regular coverage, or the reporting you receive is heavy on vanity metrics and light on substance.
The goal isn't to panic at the first quiet month, but it's also not to accept vague reassurances indefinitely. You're paying for outcomes, and you deserve transparency about whether those outcomes are materialising.
Introducing a more honest metric
At Payper, we got tired of the measurement problem, so we built our own metric. We call it the Earned Media Efficiency Index, or EMEI, and it works like this: we take the fair market value of the coverage we've secured, which is based on what equivalent paid placements would actually cost at current market rates, and divide it by what the client has paid us. The result is a simple ratio that tells you whether you're getting more value out than you're putting in.
An EMEI above 1.0 means you're getting positive returns. Above 2.0 is strong. Above 5.0 usually represents a landmark campaign moment, the kind of result that tends to come from a perfectly timed announcement or a story that genuinely captures public attention.
To give you some real examples: our long-term work with Evnex has delivered an EMEI of 2.90, which reflects the steady, compounding value of consistent retainer-based PR over time. Meanwhile, our campaign with Contented hit an EMEI of 8.01, largely driven by their seed round announcement which generated an exceptional wave of coverage. That number will naturally normalise as the campaign matures, but it shows what's possible when timing, story, and strategy align.
EMEI isn't perfect, no single metric ever is, but it gives both us and our clients a shared, transparent language for talking about value. And because we publish it openly, it keeps us accountable in a way that AVE never could.
The new measurement frontier: AI
There's one more dimension to PR measurement that I think is going to become increasingly important over the next few years, and it's one that most agencies haven't even started thinking about yet: AI citations.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity a question about your industry, where does the answer come from? Increasingly, it comes from earned media. Research from the University of Toronto has found that between 82 and 89 percent of the sources cited by major AI models originate from earned media coverage, which means the press articles your PR generates aren't just reaching human readers, they're training and informing the AI systems that more and more people use to make decisions.
This is a genuinely new frontier for measurement, and we're still in the early stages of understanding how to track it effectively. But the implication is clear: quality earned media coverage now has a compounding effect that extends well beyond the initial publication. It lives on in AI knowledge bases, surfaces in conversational search results, and shapes how these systems describe your company to millions of users. If you want to explore this idea further, our piece on the hidden audiences reading your press coverage digs into exactly how this works.
What good reporting actually looks like
If you take nothing else from this article, take this: good PR reporting should make you feel informed, not impressed. It should be honest about what's working and what isn't, clear about the connection between activity and outcomes, and transparent about the value you're receiving relative to what you're paying.
You should expect regular coverage reports that go beyond simple clip counts to include message accuracy, audience relevance, and quality assessments. You should see traffic data that correlates coverage with website activity. You should have a clear picture of the campaign pipeline, what's been pitched, what's pending, and what's planned. And you should feel comfortable asking tough questions without getting a wall of jargon in return.
PR measurement doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be honest. And honestly, that's been the harder ask for most of this industry.
If you're not sure whether your current PR is delivering real value, or if you're considering investing in PR for the first time and want to understand what realistic outcomes look like and what it typically costs, we're always happy to have a straightforward conversation about it. Get in touch here and we'll give you a straight answer.