Your agency sends a 15-page report full of charts and the word “impressions.” It looks professional. It also tells you nothing about whether the campaign worked.
That is not incompetence. It is the default setting of the industry: PR reporting is built to make activity look like results, and most clients do not know the metrics well enough to push back.
Five numbers actually tell you whether a campaign worked. The rest is decoration you are paying for.
The Vanity Metrics to Ignore
If your report leads with these, they are not telling you whether the campaign worked.
Potential impressions / reach: This is the publication’s total audience, not the people who saw your mention. A sidebar placement on Yahoo gets reported as “900 million impressions.” Actual readership of that specific article might be 150 people.
AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent): Compares your editorial mention to what an ad the same size would cost. The industry’s own measurement standard, the Barcelona Principles, rejected AVE in 2010. An agency still using it is running 16 years behind its own industry’s rules.
Number of pitches sent: Activity, not results. Five hundred pitches and zero placements is not something to put in a report.
Social media shares of coverage: Only matters if it is driving real traffic. Otherwise it is noise.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
These are the five numbers that tell you whether your PR spend is producing real business value.
1. Placement Quality: Domain Rating
Domain Rating (DR) is the single most important number for judging a placement. It is a 0-100 score of a publication’s authority and SEO power. Check it before you look at anything else in the report.
| 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 sit under DR 40, you are paying premium prices for low-value results.
2. Link Quality: Dofollow vs. Nofollow
Ask for the link type on every placement, because a “mention” is not the same as a link. 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.
If your agency is counting mentions as equivalent to dofollow links, they are inflating their results.
3. Referral Traffic
Check Google Analytics for actual clicks from each article. Do not take the agency’s word for it. This is easy to track and easy to share. If your agency is not giving you this number, ask why.
Pro Tip: Ask your agency to UTM-tag every link before the campaign starts, not after. Retrofitting tracking onto placements that already published means guessing at traffic instead of measuring it.
4. Search Ranking Impact
Track your target keyword positions before and after each campaign. Good PR should move the needle on search rankings. If nothing has budged after six months of “PR activity,” something is wrong.
5. Cost Per Placement
Divide total monthly spend by the number of meaningful placements (DR 40+). That gives you the real cost per result, which you can use to compare agencies against each other, or PR against in-house alternatives.
Benchmark: a good agency delivers DR 40+ placements at $500 to $1,500 each. If you are paying over $3,000 per placement, you are likely overpaying.
Pro Tip: Run this cost-per-placement math once a quarter, not once a year. Agencies that know you are checking regularly tend to send you their best pitches first.
The Questions to Ask Your Agency Tomorrow
Send these five questions in your next email. A good agency answers in a day; a bad one stalls.
- “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 answers these easily because they already track them. An agency hiding behind vanity metrics will struggle to produce 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.
