A Coverage KPI Conundrum: How to Benchmark Media Relations Success

Cat Soroush, Account Manager

Coverage is the hard-won bread and butter of any media relations strategy - it’s one of the KPIs brands use to measure the success of their campaigns. Beyond that, it’s the reflection of the work and dedication that has gone into identifying the most relevant narrative for your press targets and their audience. To understand the value of each article earned, it’s absolutely essential that coverage is benchmarked and presented in a way that’s backed up by numbers and is easy to understand.

We talk about reach and readership ad nauseam when it comes to coverage (after all, it’s how we quantify impact much of the time) - and there’s no better feeling than seeing your brand featured in a major publication with massive reach like Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, Rolling Stone, TechCrunch, or The Hollywood Reporter. But is reach the only way to rank coverage? Does a hit in The New York Times translate into the same results for every brand? What if a competitor is also mentioned in the article? How do you know what that coverage means for you in a way that is numbers-driven and free of subjective bias? 

Everyone has different coverage expectations: different goals, targets, and ideas of what success looks like. Whether that success is the result of a one-time campaign or ongoing media relations support, it’s up to your public relations team to collect the data and present findings to you. Relevant coverage data should provide answers to questions such as: 

• Did your brand appear in the headline or “above the fold” of an article? 

• How often did your brand appear in target publications?

• Was coverage made up of more press release reposts or original editorial, such as interviews, features, and/or bylines? 

• How often was your brand mentioned alongside a competitor, and in what tone, context, or connotation? 

The Grithaus method of scoring coverage answers all these questions and more. Every article the client is included in is reviewed and scored based on four key performance indicators: type, visibility, prominence, and competitive analysis/tone. At the end of the month, we determine what the highest rating for the amount of coverage that month could have been and average out where the client landed. Quite literally, we score the coverage like a teacher would score tests for a report card. 

This method allows us to track performance month to month – not just the quantity of coverage but the quality of it, which is arguably more important, and properly identify where the brand’s strengths and weaknesses lie. Not only does this help identify trends, like what types of announcements have the most success, or potential red flags we should watch out for and avoid, but it also enables us to develop data-informed media relations programs for the brands we work with. 

Longtime Grithaus client, Robin Kirchhoffer, marketing director, Dalet, summarizes, "Media relations is as much art as science. Context and visibility are required to make the right choices. Working with the Grithaus coverage scoring system has been a true enabler for us at Dalet; it gives us the right level of information to drive our strategy."

There’s so much more to media relations success than just reach and readership. These four KPIs enable a better understanding of how short-term wins can inform long-term success:  

TYPE: Define the Type of Coverage 

Exact terminology may vary slightly but generally, coverage can be grouped into a few different categories. We break these down into PR repost, company mention, product review, feature, and interview, amongst a few others. Certain articles, such as interviews or features, will carry more weight, scoring a higher rating than, for example, a mention in a third-party article. 

VISIBILITY: Identify & Rate Goal Media Targets 

Every brand’s media targets will differ, depending on its target audience and goals, and it’s important to not let vanity metrics interfere with great coverage in an influential industry media outlet. We determine visibility by ranking the publications that are writing about our clients. Visibility scores should map back to brand-specific goals and objectives. What one brand might consider to be a top-tier publication could be very different from another’s, and goal press targets for B2B and B2C accounts indeed will vary. The visibility score refers to the brand’s exposure to its ideal audience. While a hit in The New York Times might be nice, if you’re in the business of selling complex tech solutions to engineers, you want your brand to get covered by the outlets those professionals trust. 

PROMINENCE: Headline, Above the Fold...or Not

Where in the article is the brand mentioned? Is it featured in the headline? First sentence, or above the fold (an old school term referring to the text shown above the actual fold of a newspaper. In today’s digital terms, it’s the content that you see before you need to start scrolling)? Or, is it in the last paragraph below a host of competitors? Placement or inclusion at the top of the article or in the headline should earn a higher score than a mention in the second half of the article.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS/TONE: What’s the Verdict?

This final component of our coverage scoring rubric can oftentimes be the most critical, as it takes into account the reporter’s assessment of your brand’s product or service. Did you land a feature story, headlining a top-tier media outlet? That’s great, but if it’s a complete take-down of the brand, there’s some work to do (and possibly damage control). We also want to keep track of which competitors your brand is being pinned against most often, and if there is a trend in how you’re being compared. Step one is to assess if there is a competitor mentioned alongside the brand, then, determine how the brand is positioned against the competition to decide on a score. If there is no competitor mentioned, this score will simply signal whether the tone was positive, negative, or neutral. 

At Grithaus, we have our own proprietary method for scoring client coverage that has helped us glean some really useful insights and provide a deeper analysis on our PR efforts and performance.

Questions? Reach out to learn more about our approach.

P.S. Great coverage is earned with a great pitch. Check out We Earn Media Episode 40 | Analyze Real Pitches with Meredith Corporation’s Mia Taylor (Part 2) for a breakdown of one of Cat’s pitches and how she captured Mia’s interest.