Head of Digital PR Olivia Bence and Senior PR Executive Leila McGrorty discuss the different ways you can report more effectively on the results you secure for clients.

Working in Digital PR, we all know how difficult it can be to secure results. Mix in a pandemic, mass job redundancies in journalism, and an ever-increasing difficult news agenda, and securing those all-important links becomes even more challenging.

Whenever we do get those ‘wins’ and are able to celebrate the highs of securing a link or a piece of coverage in a dream title, it’s important to show the impact these pieces have on a client or brand. To do this, we need to choose our reporting metrics carefully.

Tough markets mean more scrutiny of results, so we’ve pulled together this guide to nail your reporting so clients know exactly what they’re getting and why they should continue to invest in a digital PR strategy.

What are the current challenges we face when reporting on Digital PR?

There is an obsession with volume and key media titles when you work in the PR industry. We’re all familiar with the classic phrase, “I just want to be featured on the Mail Online”, or “I just want 20 links.”

Part of our role as marketers is to consult our clients on what to expect realistically and share any results we achieve with them directly. We do this so our clients trust and value our opinion. Most importantly, we want them to value the work we do for them.

We know how tricky this can be — especially in the early days when you’re trying to build rapport with a new client or individual. With this in mind, the question is: Which metrics do we need to report on to gain our clients’ trust and demonstrate the value of our work?

Before we delve into this, let’s look at the most common metrics many of us may use when we report to clients. PR expert Cheryl Crossley posed the following question to her LinkedIn followers, and the results were unsurprising: Do any of these look familiar?

It seems a lot of us consider the number of results or links as the most critical measurement, but is this right?

Say hello to new metrics

While the metrics above are still important and certainly not ones we should give up, we also need to introduce benchmarks that will bring more context to these ‘volume’ metrics.

So, it’s time to look at some new options, including:

  • Driven traffic — showcasing how our links and coverage are increasing brand awareness.
  • Increase in rankings — highlighting the impact our links and coverage have on a client’s website and search.
  • Revenue generated — reporting on the impact our links and coverage have on a client’s business.

By providing more context, we highlight and showcase exactly how our results have positively impacted the client. This sets the scene and tells a success story, but most importantly — it allows our results to build trust and increase client retention.

This is something we’re proud of here at Bring Digital. We work closely with our content and SEO teams to ensure we’re constantly gathering insights and reporting on the impact our links have on a client.

It’s all about quality, not quantity 

Digital PRs need to start focusing more on the relevancy of the links we achieve for our clients rather than solely on the quantity.

Our industry moves quickly, and gone are the days when we could boast about landing 100 syndicated links in regional Reach PLC titles (we’ll pause briefly to dry our eyes). In the current era of Digital PR, five relevant links hold much more value.

Source: https://www.prdaily.com/how-pr-professionals-can-help-with-googles-eeat/

Since the launch of the Helpful Content Update in mid-2022, Google has shifted its focus to strong EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) signals. This means it’s never been more important to consider where we are landing links. When we’re creating campaigns, we should also focus on targeting titles that make sense for our clients and signal that they are a reliable voice of authority in their sector. 

But how do we know if a link is relevant? 

Here are some factors to look out for — and include in your reporting — when you land a link:

  • Where is the link pointing to on your client’s site? 
  • Is the target audience of the site relevant to your client? 
  • Does the link boost your client’s expertise in their key area?  

Reporting on links with context

When we’re reporting on links, we need to provide a balanced mix of vanity and context metrics to help our clients understand exactly what these results mean for them. But what exactly are these, and how do they look in practice? 

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are the stats that look the best. These can include some of the following:

  • Number of links
  • Number of national titles we featured in 
  • Circulation 
  • Readership 
  • Overall DA

Cheryl gave the below example:

We’ve all been there: You secure some fantastic links, and — on paper — these statistics look amazing, but the story that these figures are trying to tell isn’t immediately apparent. Do they suggest we’ve seen an increase in keyword rankings from secured links? Or has revenue and organic traffic increased? These figures could also show that traffic to the website has increased since the campaign began, but it’s all about framing them to make this win clear.

While these statistics are still great to include in reports, in isolation, they provide no information on the impact your links or results have had on a client. That’s why it’s crucial to also include context metrics, which can include:

  • Keyword rankings
  • Revenue 
  • Organic Traffic 
  • Referral Traffic 
  • Website DR 
  • Share of Voice
  • Competitor mentions

Bringing in these metrics can position your success in a more positive light to a client and show them why PR matters for their long-term success. At the end of the day, providing context is key to winning trust!

Work with your content team

Cheryl Crossley emphasises the importance of working closely with other relevant teams. At Bring Digital, our Digital PR team takes great pride in working closely with our Content team. We regularly collaborate to craft strategies for our clients which boost ranking keywords, increase visibility in the SERPs, and drive traffic to deeper onsite pages.

However, when it comes to reporting results to clients, we have been operating as separate entities, which doesn’t really align with our department’s ethos. As a result, we’ve decided to make a change.

We’ve overhauled our reporting template to highlight how a robust content strategy can support digital PR results — and vice versa. Here are some metrics we’ll include:

  • The top-ranking keywords for content in our digital PR strategy. 
  • Time on page and scroll depth. 
  • Organic traffic and the best-performing pages on our client’s site. 
  • The location of a backlink. E.g. Does it point to a specific content piece that has been outreached? 

In practice, this will look something like:

Bring value to your Digital PR strategy

We’ve upgraded our reporting process here at Bring Digital to make sure we’re accurately showcasing the impact Digital PR activity can have on our clients’ sites.

By including the appropriate metrics to showcase the relevance of our results and their impact on broader business goals — whether it’s brand awareness or increased conversions — we’re showing our clients why they should invest in us.

Are you struggling to get your brand the links it deserves? Get in touch today to see how our Digital PR team can help. For more industry insights from our amazing team here at Bring, visit our blog.