{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-insight-jsx","path":"/insight/pr-kpis-what-actually-proves-your-program-is-working","result":{"data":{"prismic":{"insightByUID":{"title":[{"type":"heading1","text":"PR KPIs: What Actually Proves Your Program Is Working","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"}],"category":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Category","name":"In-house Experts"},"author":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Person","name":"Tom Corsillo"},"feature_image":{"dimensions":{"width":7787,"height":5194},"alt":null,"copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/marino-pr/65zqkwRlP_sQ0oKy_iStock-1332176245.jpg?auto=format,compress"},"related_case_study":null,"body":[{"__typename":"PRISMIC_InsightBodyText","type":"text","primary":{"content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"For as long as PR has existed as a discipline, the industry has struggled to answer a simple question: did it work? For decades, the go-to answers were things like impressions, media placements, and Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) — a formula that estimates what a placement would have cost as an ad and multiplies it by an arbitrary number. AMEC, the international body that sets standards for communications measurement, has spent over a decade explicitly discouraging AVE, for a straightforward reason: it has no demonstrated connection to whether the business actually benefited.","spans":[{"start":346,"end":350,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://amecorg.com/the-barcelona-principles/","target":"_blank"}}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"That gap is exactly why so many companies stay skeptical of PR and marketing spend — not because the work doesn't matter, but because no one could ever show, in dollars or leads or donations, what it produced. That's changed. The tools to connect PR and marketing activity directly to a CRM — and from there to real business outcomes — now exist and are widely accessible. But the reframe that matters most isn't that measurement got easier. It's that measurement only works if it's built into the program from day one, not bolted on when someone asks for a report.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading2","text":"Why PR ROI Has Always Been Hard to Prove","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"\"PR KPI\" simply means: a number, agreed on in advance, that tells you whether a PR or marketing program is doing its job. For most of the industry's history, the numbers everyone reported weren't really KPIs at all — they were activity counts. How many articles ran. How many people theoretically saw them. How much that coverage would have cost as advertising.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The problem with all three is the same: none of them says anything about what happened next. A glowing feature in a major outlet is worth very little to a business if it didn't move anyone closer to buying, applying, donating, or signing a lease. AMEC's Barcelona Principles, first published in 2010 and now in their fourth revision, state plainly that outcomes — shifts in awareness, attitude, and especially behavior — matter more than outputs like placement counts, and that business results can and should be measured wherever possible.","spans":[{"start":247,"end":274,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://amecorg.com/barcelona-declaration-of-measurement-principles/","target":"_blank"}}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Vanity metrics stuck around anyway, mostly because nothing better was easy to get. Tying a press hit to a closed sale required manually cross-referencing spreadsheets that usually lived in different departments and never talked to each other. That's the piece that's changed.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading2","text":"What Changed: Connecting PR and Marketing Activity to Your CRM","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The shift is that PR and marketing activity can now be wired directly into the same CRM (customer relationship management system — the database of contacts, deals, and donors a sales or development team already runs on) that the rest of the business uses to track revenue. A media placement gets a tracked link. That link leads to a page with a tracked form. That form submission lands in the CRM as a lead. The CRM then shows what happened to that lead — did it become a customer, a donor, a tenant — and what it was worth.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"That loop is what makes a KPI real instead of a proxy. Industry data backs up how far this has come: multi-touch attribution, which credits every touchpoint in a buyer's journey rather than just the last click, has reached roughly 41% adoption at the enterprise level — nearly double where it stood a few years earlier. Organizations that implement it are seeing measurable gains: multi-touch attribution has been linked to marketing ROI improvements around 18%, lead quality gains near 22%, and faster sales cycles, according to research cited by Forrester and McKinsey.","spans":[{"start":231,"end":267,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.omnibound.ai/blog/marketing-attribution-statistics","target":"_blank"}},{"start":381,"end":515,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.marketingmary.ai/blog/marketing-attribution-models-guide","target":"_blank"}}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"There's also a newer channel worth building into any measurement plan: AI search. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews a question about your category, does the answer mention you — and does that visibility turn into visits or leads? Early data suggests it's an unusually efficient channel: traffic referred from AI platforms has been shown to convert well above the rate of typical web traffic. It's a new line item on the KPI list, not a replacement for the others — and it only shows up if someone is tracking referral source in the first place.","spans":[{"start":317,"end":420,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://authoritytech.io/blog/how-to-prove-pr-roi-beyond-vanity-metrics-2026","target":"_blank"}}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading2","text":"The KPIs That Actually Prove Your Program Is Working","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Once PR and marketing activity is connected to the CRM, the KPIs that matter start to look less like communications metrics and more like business metrics. In practice, they fall into a few categories:","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Leads and qualified leads. How many people took a trackable action — a form fill, a demo request, an inquiry — after encountering a specific piece of coverage, content, or campaign, and how many of those were sales-qualified.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":26,"type":"strong"}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Pipeline and closed revenue (or donations). What happened to those leads in the CRM. Did they turn into signed clients, closed sales, secured donations, or leased units — and what were they worth? This is the number that actually answers the ROI question: (revenue attributed to the activity minus the cost of the activity) divided by the cost, expressed as a percentage.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":43,"type":"strong"},{"start":256,"end":343,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://authoritytech.io/blog/how-to-prove-pr-roi-beyond-vanity-metrics-2026","target":"_blank"}}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Conversion rate by channel and source. Not just how much traffic a placement or campaign drove, but what portion of it took the next step — and how that compares across earned media, paid, social, and organic search.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":38,"type":"strong"}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Cost per lead and cost per acquisition. What it actually costs, on average, to generate a qualified lead or a new customer through PR and marketing activity versus other channels.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":39,"type":"strong"}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"AI citation and visibility rate. How often a brand shows up when someone asks an AI platform a category question, and whether that visibility is translating into referral traffic — a metric our own team tracks and writes about as its own discipline within digital measurement.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":32,"type":"strong"},{"start":190,"end":226,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://marinopr.com/insight/introducing-marinos-ai-and-digital-marketing-newsletter/","target":"_blank"}}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"None of these numbers require guesswork once the infrastructure is in place. They require that the infrastructure exists — which is the part most programs skip.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading2","text":"Why Transparency Doesn't Happen Automatically","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Here's the part that gets left out of most conversations about PR measurement: none of it happens on its own. A CRM integration, an attribution model, and a set of agreed-upon KPIs all have to be built into a program deliberately — and that takes real collaboration between the client and the agency, not just better software.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In practice, that means a few things have to happen before a campaign starts, not after someone asks for a results report. As one measurement consultant put it, the biggest gap most teams run into is between engagement data and revenue data — teams can see that a campaign drove traffic or attention, but can't tie it to what closed. Closing that gap is a matter of infrastructure and access, and it echoes a principle we've argued for elsewhere: there's no such thing as a random act of marketing that also happens to be measurable. Measurement has to be designed into the plan from the start.","spans":[{"start":161,"end":240,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.agilitypr.com/pr-news/measurement-data-analysis/measuring-pr-roi-advanced-attribution-models-for-earned-media-and-brand-visibility/","target":"_blank"}},{"start":472,"end":497,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://marinopr.com/insight/an-intro-to-integrated-strategy","target":"_blank"}}],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading2","text":"What Communications Teams Should Do Now","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"list-item","text":"Agree on the two or three business outcomes that matter most — leads, sales, donations, leases, applications — before a campaign starts, not when the results are due.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"list-item","text":"Give your agency reporting access to the relevant parts of your CRM at kickoff. Attribution can't happen if the agency never sees what happened after the click.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"list-item","text":"Put a unique tracked link or landing page on every piece of earned media, content, and campaign activity — no exceptions, even for placements that feel like pure brand-building.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"list-item","text":"Pick one attribution model — first-touch, multi-touch, or last-touch — and define it in writing before the campaign runs, so no one is arguing about how credit gets assigned after the fact.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"list-item","text":"Track AI platform referral traffic (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot) as its own line item, the same way you'd track organic search or paid social.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"list-item","text":"Review KPI performance against CRM data on a set cadence — monthly or quarterly — instead of only at contract renewal, so the program can adjust while it's still running.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading2","text":"Beyond the Comms Team: What It Takes From Everyone","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Measurement infrastructure isn't a one-department project. Getting from vanity metrics to a real ROI number takes buy-in from three groups, each with a specific job to do.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading3","text":"If You're the One Paying for the Program","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Come to the relationship with clear business objectives, not just a general sense that you need \"more visibility.\" Be willing to grant CRM access, even limited or read-only, to the team measuring your results — without it, no agency can show you anything beyond activity counts. And build measurement costs into the budget from the start; attribution tooling and reporting time aren't free add-ons, they're part of what makes the rest of the spend accountable.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading3","text":"If You're the Agency","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Ask for CRM and analytics access during the pitch or onboarding process, not three months into the engagement. Propose the attribution model and KPI set before the first campaign launches, and put it in writing. And be honest when a metric is a leading indicator rather than a hard revenue number — a growing pipeline is real progress, even before it closes.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading3","text":"If You're in Sales or Business Development","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Tag leads by source in the CRM consistently, every time, even when it feels like extra data entry — that field is what makes attribution possible downstream. Close the loop back to the communications team on which leads converted and which didn't, and why. That feedback is what turns a KPI dashboard into an actual improvement cycle rather than a report nobody reads.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading2","text":"FAQ: Measuring PR and Marketing ROI","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading3","text":"What is a PR KPI?","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"A PR KPI (key performance indicator) is a specific, agreed-upon number used to judge whether a PR or marketing program is working — ideally one tied to a business outcome like leads, revenue, or donations, rather than an activity count like media placements or impressions.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading3","text":"Why are impressions a bad way to measure PR?","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Impressions only estimate how many people could have seen a piece of coverage — they say nothing about whether anyone acted on it. AMEC, the industry body that sets global measurement standards, has long discouraged impression-based formulas like Advertising Value Equivalency because they show no demonstrated link to business results.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading3","text":"Can PR ROI actually be measured in dollars?","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Yes, when PR and marketing activity is connected to a CRM. Tracked links and landing pages let a placement or campaign be tied to a lead, and the CRM shows whether that lead converted into revenue — making it possible to calculate ROI as attributed revenue minus program cost, divided by cost.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading3","text":"Do I need a CRM to measure PR ROI?","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"You need some system that tracks what happens to a lead after it's generated — most commonly a CRM, but a shared spreadsheet or lightweight database can work at a smaller scale. The requirement isn't a specific tool; it's that PR-generated leads get tagged by source and followed through to an outcome.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading3","text":"How long does it take to start seeing measurable PR ROI?","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"It depends on the sales or donation cycle, but the tracking infrastructure — tagged links, defined KPIs, CRM access — should be in place before a campaign launches, not built retroactively. Leading indicators like qualified leads and pipeline value are typically visible within the first reporting period; revenue or donation attribution follows on whatever timeline deals or gifts normally close.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"heading2","text":"The Bottom Line","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"PR and marketing ROI isn't unknowable anymore — the tools to connect earned media, content, and campaigns to real business outcomes are mature and accessible. What's still rare is the discipline to build that connection into a program from the start: shared CRM access, an agreed attribution model, and clear business objectives, decided before the first placement runs rather than debated after. That's the difference between a program that reports impressions and one that reports revenue.","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Want more on how measurement, analytics, and infrastructure fit together in a modern PR and marketing program? Check out Marino's AI and Digital Marketing Newsletter for ongoing coverage.","spans":[{"start":121,"end":165,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://marinopr.com/insight/introducing-marinos-ai-and-digital-marketing-newsletter/","target":"_blank"}}],"direction":"ltr"}],"alignment":"Left"}},{"__typename":"PRISMIC_InsightBodyCustom_html","type":"custom_html","primary":{"content":[{"type":"preformatted","text":"<script charset=\"utf-8\" type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"//js.hsforms.net/forms/embed/v2.js\"></script>\n<script>\n  hbspt.forms.create({\n    portalId: \"46082381\",\n    formId: \"a01501c4-d8ad-417b-bead-b37a626373a7\"\n  });\n</script>","spans":[],"direction":"ltr"}]}}],"related_insights":[{"insight":null}],"get_in_touch_heading":null,"social_title":null,"social_description":null,"social_image":null},"allSite_settingss":{"edges":[{"node":{"get_in_touch_heading":"Everything starts with a conversation."}}]}}},"pageContext":{"rootQuery":"\n  query InsightQuery($uid: String!) {\n    prismic {\n      insightByUID: insight(uid: $uid, lang: \"en-us\") {\n        title\n        category {\n          ... on PRISMIC_Category {\n            name\n          }\n        }\n        author {\n          ... on PRISMIC_Person {\n            name\n          }\n        }\n        feature_image\n        related_case_study {\n          ... on PRISMIC_Case_study {\n            client_name\n            tagline\n            feature_image\n            area {\n              ... on PRISMIC_Area {\n                name\n              }\n            }\n            _meta {\n              uid\n            }\n          }\n        }\n        body {\n          ... on PRISMIC_InsightBodyText {\n            type\n            primary {\n              content\n              alignment\n            }\n          }\n          ... on PRISMIC_InsightBodyCustom_html {\n            type\n            primary {\n              content\n            }\n          }\n          ... on PRISMIC_InsightBodyQuote {\n            type\n            primary {\n              quote {\n                ... on PRISMIC_Quote {\n                  content\n                  name\n                  title\n                }\n              }\n            }\n          }\n          ... on PRISMIC_InsightBodyContent_block {\n            type\n            primary {\n              image\n              caption\n              rubric\n              content\n            }\n          }\n          ... on PRISMIC_InsightBodyCallout {\n            type\n            primary {\n              callout\n              rubric\n              content\n            }\n          }\n        }\n        related_insights {\n          insight {\n            ... on PRISMIC_Insight {\n              _meta {\n                uid\n              }\n              title\n              feature_image\n              category {\n                ... on PRISMIC_Category {\n                  name\n                }\n              }    \n            }\n          }\n        }\n        get_in_touch_heading\n        social_title\n        social_description\n        social_image\n      }\n      allSite_settingss {\n        edges {\n          node {\n            get_in_touch_heading\n          }\n        }\n      }\n    }\n  }\n","id":"ao7wZxIAACsA1dhb","lang":"en-us","uid":"pr-kpis-what-actually-proves-your-program-is-working","type":"insight","alternateLanguages":[],"cursor":"YXJyYXljb25uZWN0aW9uOjE5OA==","paginationPreviousMeta":{"id":"aox7nhIAACgA0aUZ","lang":"en-us","uid":"does-claude-leave-watermarks","type":"insight","alternateLanguages":[]},"paginationPreviousUid":"does-claude-leave-watermarks","paginationPreviousLang":"en-us","paginationNextMeta":{"id":"apWMQREAACcAzGFa","lang":"en-us","uid":"micro-influencers-growth-engine","type":"insight","alternateLanguages":[]},"paginationNextUid":"micro-influencers-growth-engine","paginationNextLang":"en-us","lastQueryChunkEndCursor":"YXJyYXljb25uZWN0aW9uOjE3OQ=="}}}