How (not) to measure ROI from a tech PR campaign
By Matt Neicho, Account Director, TFD
The value of a PR campaign can be one of the hardest things to prove on a spreadsheet.
Your article publishes, a prospect reads it, and six months later, they make a purchase. Connecting those three events is a challenge. But that’s one of the most important things B2B PR measurement strives to achieve, and it’s why “was my PR campaign successful?” is such a frequently asked question.
It’s also why there are now hundreds of different ways to measure a PR campaign, with new metrics appearing all the time: AI search visibility, sentiment, quality of engagement, message pull-through, etc.
Each is valid and could be the right fit depending on the campaign, but walking through every scenario and every metric would take a book, not a blog post.
So, here, we’ve decided to focus more on how NOT to measure ROI from your B2B PR campaign. After all, the mistakes are more consistent than the successes, and avoiding them will get you closer to the truth.
The 95/5 rule - don’t just measure PR as lead-gen
The 95/5 rule states that, at any given time, only 5% of a B2B market is actively looking to buy. The ‘rule’ is more of a heuristic than a hard-researched stat (there are far too many variables to get to an exact figure), but it gets to the core of the B2B sales cycle, and why PR is inherently valuable. In terms of future sales, it makes much more sense to dedicate time to marketing 95% of potential customers rather than the 5% who are only looking to buy today.
If you judge a PR programme purely on “leads generated this quarter,” then you’re only judging it against 5% of the people it actually reaches. The other 95% are still potential buyers, just not yet. PR’s job is to make sure your brand is already visible, trusted, and understood by the time they become actual buyers (the 5%).
That’s harder to measure than a lead count, but it isn’t unmeasurable. Three things are closer to the truth:
1) Message pull-through
Tracking whether your key messages are turning up unprompted in coverage and analyst commentary months after a campaign. And also, tracking where those messages are appearing, ensuring coverage appears in publications read by your target audience(s).
2) Search volume and web traffic
Tracking branded search volume and web traffic as a trend rather than a one-off spike, since it's a reasonable proxy for whether people are recalling the brand when they need it.
3) Share of voice
Tracking share of voice against named competitors over time, rather than as a single campaign snapshot.
Don’t measure Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE)
AVE is an (incredibly) crude attempt at calculating the value of PR. It estimates the monetary value of media coverage by calculating what the equivalent paid ad space would cost. It then multiplies that by an arbitrary editorial multiplier, like three, to demonstrate that earned media is more effective than paid media.
For example, if your earned media article is two pages long, and the magazine’s ad rate for one page is £1000, the cost to buy an ad equals £2000.
AVE = Cost to buy an ad x editorial multiplier
Modern PR tools often adapt this base calculation to factor in other things like online reach and engagement probability. The fact that many of these platforms still include AVE as a statistic in PR reports is one of the unfortunate reasons that this misaligned metric continues to survive.
A PR placement isn’t an ad. It wasn’t bought and, in most cases, you didn’t control the headline or the overall content. Also, a reader trusts an independent journalist’s assessment differently from a paid placement they know is trying to sell them something. AVE treats these as interchangeable. Which they absolutely are not.
Lesson
AMEC, the industry’s standard for communications and PR measurement, states that AVE is not a valid measure of PR value. Presenting an AVE figure in a PR results deck is reporting a number that the industry’s own standards body has ruled out. Instead, measure and evaluate the contribution of communication by its outcome and impact.
Outputs, outcomes, and impact
Calculating the value of a tech PR campaign is about measuring outputs, outcomes, and impact:
- Outputs are what you produce (a blog, an article, a mention, etc.).
- Outcomes are the subsequent change in your audience’s attitude or behaviour.
- Impact is what that change does for your business or society.
Determining the true ROI of a PR campaign means looking beyond outputs alone. Each output should be mapped to an outcome, and each outcome mapped to an impact.
Bear in mind that output and outcomes are not the same. The volume of media coverage achieved from your tech PR campaign is not the same as the actual effect on your audience.
Measuring the ROI of a PR campaign solely based on outputs is very common, but it won’t capture the true outcomes or long-term impact of that work.
Report on a schedule that matches how fast each measure actually moves. Track fast-moving indicators daily or weekly, like media hits. Review slower-moving measures quarterly, like share of voice.
Our work with Adaptavist shows this chain of measurement in practice:
- Output: 217 pieces of coverage across the UK, Australia, and the US (up from 39 the year before), plus 12 national radio interviews.
- Outcome: a spike in traffic to the Adaptavist website at launch, with 80% of that traffic being new users. This shows a behavioural shift beyond just visibility.
- Impact: Growth in inbound cold enquiries to the business. Adaptavist positioned as a thought leader in the future-of-work space, sustained over three years of the campaign’s evolution.
Measuring all three together is the type of PR reporting that helps communicate with the C-suite because it shows what was produced, what changed as a result, and what that change was worth to the business.
In practice, measuring outcomes is often the hardest of the three to find budget for. Tracking a genuine shift in audience attitude or behaviour usually means running longitudinal surveys. That’s a cost many clients are reluctant to add to a PR budget when they could use that same budget to run an actual PR-led survey to gain even more media coverage. Sometimes there’s simply an existing trust in the PR process, often because they’re seeing signals (sales conversations, inbound enquiries) that never reach the PR team’s dashboard. After all, Gartner suggests that B2B buyers complete 80% of their purchase journey before they ever contact a vendor directly.
Here are a few low-cost, low-effort ways to track the actual impact of a PR campaign:
- CRM tracking: adding a new “how did you hear about us” field in the CRM, with a tag for PR/media specifically (e.g. heard through reading an article, press release, etc. from the company)
- Sales team qualitative feedback: a regular monthly call or a Slack channel.
- Branded search volume trend: Google Search Console is free (Google Trends can work too, but tends to require higher search volumes).
- Direct/organic traffic spikes correlated with coverage dates: using Google Analytics or similar.
- Inbound enquiry volume and source: usually just a matter of asking whoever owns the contact form or inbox to tag entries
Lesson
Effectively measuring outcomes and impact requires you to:
- Understand what the organisation’s broader goals are before the PR campaign starts.
- Understand who the target audience(s) are.
- Calculate a benchmark before the campaign starts.
AI has changed PR measurement
AI has changed two things in measuring the value of PR.
How coverage gets analysed
AI means you don’t have to read 200 articles to work out what narrative is forming. Most PR tools now integrate AI to quickly classify coverage by theme and track how a narrative moves, whether it’s just starting to appear, gathering pace, peaking, fading, etc.
As Jennifer Erickson, CCO at Mastercard, mentioned when we spoke to her for The Future of B2B Communications Playbook:
We see AI as an efficiency and productivity tool – one to more effectively communicate and measure our work. For example, we might use it as a digital sparring partner and editor or to identify actionable insights.
AI doesn’t replace a PR expert. A person needs to decide what the shift actually means for positioning, but it reduces the time between the data landing and someone acting on it.
Where buyers do their research
A growing number of B2B buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about a product category before they ever land on a company website.
Whether your company gets cited when someone asks an AI engine “who are the leading providers of X” is becoming a measurable PR outcome in its own right, sometimes called AI citation tracking or share of model.
This is especially important for deep tech companies because being recognised as a technically credible source matters a lot more.
As of May 2026, Google added a native AI Assistant channel to GA4 that automatically tags visits from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. This gives a rough view of AI-driven website traffic without any setup. So, one thing you can do today is start adding this to your measurement.
Lesson
- Build a panel of 20-30 questions your buyers might realistically type into an AI tool
- Run it monthly/quarterly
- Track if you show up, how you’re described, who is mentioned alongside you, and which sources it’s pulling from
- Start tracking AI-driven website traffic in GA4
PR measurement is more of a mindset than a metric
I appreciate that none of this gives you a single number to put in a board deck. But “was my PR campaign successful?” isn’t answered by one metric, but rather by defining your objectives, determining which metrics work best, measuring them at the right pace, then mapping them from output to outcome to impact.