The measurement problem is older than you think
Public relations has been arguing about measurement for decades. Advertising Value Equivalency, calculating the "value" of earned media coverage by comparing it to what the equivalent advertising space would have cost, was invented as a shortcut and has been contested ever since. Industry bodies have repeatedly recommended its discontinuation. PR practitioners who know better still use it because clients ask for it and because the alternatives require more work and more sophistication to communicate.
The deeper problem is not AVE specifically. It is that PR sits in an uncomfortable position between activity that is genuinely difficult to attribute directly to business outcomes, and an environment where every function is expected to show ROI in trackable, accountable terms. The response to that pressure has often been to reach for metrics that look like business metrics but are not, media impressions, advertising equivalency, coverage volume, rather than to do the harder work of connecting PR activity to things the business actually cares about.
There is a better way to think about this. It requires abandoning some of the comfortable shortcuts and building a framework that is more honest about what PR can and cannot prove, while still demonstrating its value clearly.
The Barcelona Principles, updated
The communications industry's most widely referenced framework for PR measurement is the Barcelona Principles, first agreed in 2010 and updated in 2020. The core ideas remain sound: goals should be set at the start, outcomes should be measured rather than outputs, AVE should not be used, and PR measurement should integrate with overall business goals rather than operate as a separate scorecard.
In practice, this means asking: what business objective is this PR programme supposed to support? If the answer is brand awareness, the relevant measurement is brand tracking data, prompted and unprompted awareness, perception scores, share of voice in your category. If the answer is sales pipeline, the relevant measurement is how media coverage and PR activity contribute to web traffic, lead generation, or sales enquiry volume. If the answer is recruitment, the relevant measurement is application quality, employer brand perception, and candidate familiarity with the organisation at point of application.
PR measurement without a defined business objective is almost always meaningless. The question "how do we measure PR?" has no good answer in the abstract. The question "how do we measure whether our PR programme is achieving its specific business objective?" is answerable.
Measuring PR starts by deciding what you are trying to achieve. Without that, you are counting things, not measuring progress.
The metrics worth tracking
Coverage volume and reach are output metrics; they tell you what the PR function did, not what it achieved. They are worth tracking as activity measures, but they should sit below the more important outcome metrics rather than being presented as the main result.
Outcome metrics to prioritise include: branded search volume trends (a reliable proxy for awareness change), direct website traffic (people who come to you without a prompt, which reflects growing brand awareness), share of voice in your category across earned media and relevant publications, and for B2B programmes, the proportion of closed deals where media coverage or brand recognition was cited as a factor by the sales team.
Media quality is also a more useful measure than volume. Coverage in a publication your target audience actively reads and trusts is worth more than ten mentions in outlets they have never heard of. Tracking reach-to-target-audience rather than total reach gives a better picture of whether the coverage is actually doing anything.
Integrating PR data with the broader marketing picture
One of the structural problems with PR measurement is that it often sits in a separate reporting track from the rest of the marketing function. A PR team reports on coverage. A demand gen team reports on pipeline. The connection between the two is rarely tracked explicitly, which means PR's contribution to pipeline is invisible in the reporting even when it exists.
Fixing this requires intentional integration. Tracking UTM parameters from press coverage. Monitoring branded search spikes in the days following significant coverage. Including brand tracking as a standard metric in the marketing reporting dashboard. Asking sales teams, as part of deal recording, whether the prospect mentioned having seen the company in the press. None of these is perfectly clean attribution, but together they build a picture that is more honest and more useful than coverage volume alone.
What honest PR measurement looks like
Honest PR measurement acknowledges that some of the value is difficult to quantify directly, while still tracking what can be tracked. It sets clear objectives at the start of a programme. It uses outcome metrics as the primary measures. It connects PR data to the broader marketing picture rather than reporting it in isolation. And it presents results in context, what was the goal, what happened, what contributed to that outcome, and what would we do differently?
Teams that measure PR this way tend to have more productive conversations about what PR is for and what it can achieve. They can make the case for investment more credibly because the case is based on evidence rather than impressions. And they can identify what is working and what is not before the next campaign cycle, rather than after it.