Your PR agency sends you a report every month. It is 15 pages long. Full of charts. Mentions “impressions” a lot. It looks professional. And it tells you absolutely nothing about whether your investment is working.
This is not an accident. The PR industry has spent decades perfecting the art of reporting activity instead of results. And most clients do not know enough about PR metrics to call them on it.
Here is what your agency should be reporting, what those numbers actually mean, and the questions you should be asking in your next review meeting.
The Vanity Metrics to Ignore
Let us start with what does not matter, because this is probably most of what you are currently seeing.
Potential impressions / reach: This is the publication’s total audience, not the people who saw your mention. If your placement ran in a sidebar article on Yahoo, they will claim 900 million “impressions.” The actual readership of that specific article might be 150 people.
AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent): Compares your editorial mention to what an ad of the same size would cost. This metric was formally rejected by the Barcelona Principles (the PR industry’s own measurement standards) in 2010. If your agency still uses it, they are 16 years behind their own industry.
Number of pitches sent: Activity, not results. Sending 500 pitches that produce zero placements is not something to celebrate.
Social media shares of coverage: Unless these shares are driving meaningful traffic, they are noise.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
Here are the numbers that tell you whether your PR spend is generating real business value:
1. Placement Quality: Domain Rating
Every publication has a Domain Rating (DR), a score from 0 to 100 that measures its authority and SEO power. This is the single most important metric for evaluating a PR placement.
| DR Range | What It Means | Example Publications |
|---|---|---|
| DR 70+ | Major authority. Significant SEO impact. | Forbes, Yahoo, Metro, Express |
| DR 50-69 | Strong authority. Good SEO value. | Industry leaders, regional news |
| DR 30-49 | Moderate authority. Some value. | Niche publications, smaller news |
| Under DR 30 | Low authority. Minimal SEO impact. | Small blogs, new sites |
If most of your agency’s placements are under DR 40, you are paying premium prices for low-value results.
2. Link Quality: Dofollow vs. Nofollow
Not all links are equal. A dofollow editorial link passes SEO authority to your site. A nofollow link does not. A brand mention with no link at all has zero direct SEO value.
Your agency should report the exact link status of every placement. If they are counting “mentions” as equivalent to dofollow links, they are inflating their results.
3. Referral Traffic
How many people actually clicked through from the article to your website? This is easily tracked in Google Analytics. If your agency is not sharing this data, ask why.
4. Search Ranking Impact
Good PR should improve your search rankings for target keywords. Track your keyword positions before and after PR campaigns. If rankings are not moving after six months of “PR activity,” something is wrong.
5. Cost Per Placement
Take your total monthly spend and divide by the number of meaningful placements (DR 40+). This gives you a real cost-per-result metric you can compare against other agencies or in-house alternatives.
Benchmark: a good agency should deliver DR 40+ placements at $500 to $1,500 each. If your cost per placement is over $3,000, you are likely overpaying.
The Questions to Ask Your Agency Tomorrow
- “Can you send me a spreadsheet with every placement from the last 6 months, including the URL, domain rating, and link type?”
- “What is our average cost per placement for DR 50+ sites?”
- “How has our referral traffic from PR placements changed month over month?”
- “Which target keywords have improved in ranking since we started?”
- “What is the total dofollow link count you have earned us, and from which domains?”
A good agency will answer these questions easily because they track them already. An agency hiding behind vanity metrics will struggle to provide this data. That struggle is your answer.
What Good Reporting Looks Like
A useful PR report fits on one page and answers three questions:
- What did we earn? (specific placements with DR, link type, and traffic)
- What is the SEO impact? (ranking changes, domain authority trend, backlink profile growth)
- What is next? (upcoming angles, target publications, campaign plans)
Everything else is decoration. If your agency needs 15 pages to explain what they did last month, they are probably padding.
Want PR reporting you can actually use? Every Presslei campaign includes transparent, metrics-driven reporting with real URLs, real domain ratings, and real traffic data. No impressions. No AVE. No fluff.
About the Author
Salvador Jovells
Founder of Presslei. 12+ years in ecommerce SEO across international markets. After a decade of link buying for Hockerty and Sumissura, I reverse-engineered 5,272 earned media placements and founded a reactive PR agency that builds authority through data-driven stories journalists actually want to publish. Based in Zurich.
