How to Prove the ROI of PR in 2025

PR is often seen as a “nice-to-have” rather than a business essential, especially when budgets tighten. But for marketing, eCommerce and SEO teams, it’s becoming harder to overlook just how much strategic value it can add. 

The challenge, however, is proving it. 

Unlike paid ads, where you can track metrics like impressions and click-throughs, PR results are often more nuanced and harder to quantify. Which is why it’s often misreported and why reporting needs to evolve. 

In fact, there are plenty of reasons why no brand should overlook PR - if you’re serious about building visibility and trust. 

So, what does good PR reporting actually look like? And how do you measure it in a way that shows clear, measurable value to stakeholders? 

PR Metrics That Prove ROI

Not all PR metrics are created equal. If you want to understand the real value of PR, focus on the ones that tie directly into business outcomes. 

Sales & Revenue 

Sales and revenue figures are some of the clearest ways to showcase PR’s commercial value. Stakeholders care about impact, so if you can show that PR coverage is contributing to conversions, it’s a strong case for long-term investment. 

There are several ways to track conversions and sales from earned media, whether that's diving into affiliate network data like Skimlinks or using Google Analytics 4 to monitor referral traffic and attributed revenue. If your PR agency has access to affiliate data, they can get a clear view of which online articles drove actual sales.

This kind of data is arguably a far stronger indicator of value than something like AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency), a metric that’s increasingly seen as outdated and often wildly underestimates the actual value of a piece of incredible earned media coverage. 

Sales and revenue don’t always have to be ultra granular either. If a hero product sells out after a Vogue placement or sales spike following a brand feature, that’s still a meaningful sign that PR is working. While it’s not always easy to attribute these upticks directly to PR, the correlation is clear - great coverage drives results. 

Share of Voice  

Share of voice refers to the amount of media coverage your brand receives compared to key competitors in your space. And let’s be honest - most leadership teams want to know how they stack up against competitors! 

Tracking this monthly gives you a useful benchmark to answer questions like - is your brand being talked about more often? Is interest growing? And are journalists choosing to write about you over your competitors?

While it’s a long-term metric, a rising share of voice often correlates with increased visibility, authority and trust.  

AI Visibility

People aren’t relying solely on Google anymore. They’re turning to AI tools for product recommendations, service comparisons, and brand research. For SEO and marketing teams, the key question is quickly becoming, “How do we make sure our brand is showing up in AI-generated answers?”

As generative search evolves, optimising your brand’s visibility in these results needs to be a part of your PR strategy and your reporting. 

With the right third-party tools, you can now track how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses related to your industry, identify which platforms you’re showing up in, and build a strategy that gets you into the sources and publications AI trusts and cites most.

You can also track visibility for specific prompts to show how coverage impacts performance. For example, if you’ve secured coverage for a campaign on “the most scenic train routes in Europe,” you might see increased visibility for that exact phrase in tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity. 

Branded Search Volume 

A rise in branded search volume is a great way to gauge if PR activity is landing with your audience. If people are searching for your brand or product by name, it usually means they’ve heard about you, and PR is often the spark.

Let’s say you secure a top-tier placement for a hero product in a publication like The Independent’s Indy List. If you then see an uptick in search interest for this product and a boost in its Google rankings, that’s a clear indicator that the coverage is contributing to awareness and intent.

But it’s not just branded terms that matter. If you’re consistently placing thought leadership or product listings around topics like ‘sustainable activewear’, you might also see improvements in your keyword rankings for those phrases. 

You can use tools like Google Trends, Ahrefs, Semrush, or SEOmonitor to track branded search volume and keyword ranking shifts over time and map spikes back to PR activity. It’s not always a perfect science, but it’s a useful way to demonstrate that PR is influencing what your customers are actively searching for and how you’re showing up in those results. 

Brand Impact Metrics Still Worth Tracking

While ROI metrics are important, other metrics still play a part in understanding the impact of PR on your brand. Not every impact can be directly tied to sales, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth tracking, especially when reporting to commercial stakeholders. 

Most marketing, SEO and brand teams will agree that the real value of building a brand narrative isn’t always measurable in hard numbers. 

Quality Coverage & Dream Publications 

The bread and butter of PR, coverage placements, are one of the top outcomes you need to be tracking. What’s defined as ‘quality’ will look different for every brand, but when reviewing placements, ask yourself: 

Sentiment: Is your brand being talked about in a positive light?

Message pull through: Did your core brand messages come through clearly?

Image inclusion: Is your product or brand imagery featured?  

Standalone vs shared: Is the piece solely about your brand, or are competitors featured too? 

Dream publication: Is this a publication you’ve always wanted to feature in?

Strategic timing: Does the coverage align with a key launch, seasonal push, or commercial moment?

Quality always holds more value than quantity. If you’ve been promised a set number of placements that seems too good to be true, it probably is. Great placements, especially in your ‘dream publications’, take time and are usually the result of consistent, long-term brand storytelling. 

Ultimately, the goal is to land placements that are genuinely relevant to your brand, industry and audience. 

Readership & Reach 

Also known as media impressions, these numbers estimate how many people could have seen your brand’s coverage, usually based on a publication’s print circulation, often multiplied by 3 to account for pass-along readership (the idea that one copy of a magazine or newspaper might be read by multiple people), or monthly unique website visitors.

While these figures still offer helpful context, they need to be framed carefully. They don’t represent actual readers of a specific article, but rather its potential reach.

This is often the figure stakeholders question most. They’re best combined with more concrete metrics, like branded search or referral revenue, to paint a fuller picture of how your coverage is contributing to visibility, awareness and brand momentum.

PR reporting doesn’t need to rely on outdated or vanity metrics. When you combine clear performance data with context around where, how, and why your brand is showing up, you can prove the value of PR in a way your stakeholders truly understand.

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