To measure the success of a B2B tech PR campaign, start with your business objectives and establish a baseline before any activity begins. Then agree on a small set of measures linked to those objectives. These could include: share of voice, key message pull-through, coverage in the publications your buyers read, website and search performance, visibility in AI answer engines and enquiries linked to media coverage. Review the results regularly with your agency and use what you learn to shape the next phase of the campaign.
Good measurement shows the business what PR is delivering, and it tells you and your agency what's working and what’s not..
A handful of well-chosen measures, tracked consistently, will tell you a clear story about the value of your PR. This guide explains our approach to measuring the success of a B2B tech PR campaign.
1. What do you want your PR campaign to achieve?
Measurement starts with objectives. Before you think about metrics, agree what the campaign is for. It might be building awareness ahead of a funding round, building visibility in a new market, changing how buyers see you or supporting a product launch.
A good starting point is to set SMART objectives – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. In other words, be clear about exactly what you want PR to achieve, how you'll measure it, whether it's realistic, how it supports the wider business and when you expect to achieve it. For example, rather than simply aiming to 'raise awareness', you might set a goal to increase your share of voice among five key competitors by 10 percentage points over six months.
Then work out which metrics will help you track progress against each objective. If the goal is to be seen as a leader in your category, share of voice and key message pull-through will matter most. If the goal is to support sales, you'll focus more on the number and quality of enquiries and how often your sales team uses coverage in their conversations. Agree these objectives and measures with your leadership team and put them in writing, so everyone is judging the campaign by the same standard.
2. Set a baseline before you start
You can only show progress if you know where you started. Before the campaign begins, record your starting point for each measure. How much coverage are you getting, and where? How does your share of voice compare with your main competitors? How much website traffic comes from links in media coverage, and how visible are you in search results and AI answers?
This doesn't need to be a huge undertaking. A snapshot of the last three to six months is usually enough to give you a fair starting point, and it makes every report after it far more useful.
3. Agree a measurement framework with your agency
The most useful frameworks look at three levels: outputs, outcomes and impact.
Outputs are what the campaign produces, such as coverage, interviews and bylined articles.
Outcomes are what changes in your audience as a result, such as awareness, perception and engagement.
Impact is what that means for the business, such as enquiries, pipeline and reputation with your target audience.
Outputs are usually easier to measure, but impact can be difficult to prove, so a good framework includes all three. If you'd like a reference point, the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework is widely used across the industry and free to access.
Your agency should propose a framework built around your objectives and agree with you before the campaign begins. Keep it focused. Five or six measures you track consistently will tell you more than twenty you glance at.
4. Judge coverage on quality as well as volume
A count of articles tells you something, but it won't tell you whether the right people saw them. For B2B tech, one article in a relevant trade publication can do more for your brand than several pieces of national media coverage that don’t reach your target audience.
When you look at coverage, ask a few simple questions. Was it in a title your buyers read? Did it feature your spokesperson or use your data? Did it carry your key messages? Was your brand the focus of the piece or a passing mention? Many agencies use a simple scoring system to rate each piece of coverage against criteria like these, which makes quality much easier to track over time.
5. How does your share of voice compare with your competitors?
Share of voice measures how much of the conversation in your market you own compared with your competitors. It's one of the clearest ways to show progress in B2B tech, because it puts your coverage in context. Getting more coverage in a quiet month means less if your competitors got more.
Agree with your agency which competitors, publications and topics to include in the comparison, and track them consistently. It's most useful as a trend over several months, so look at the direction of travel as well as any single month.
6. Are your key messages landing?
Coverage is only as useful as what it says about you. Message pull-through tracks how often the messages you care about appear in your coverage. If you want to be known for securing hybrid cloud environments and every article describes you as a firewall vendor, that's worth knowing early.
Sentiment is worth tracking alongside it, so you can see how the tone of your coverage changes over time. Together, they tell you whether the story you're telling is the one people are hearing.
7. Follow your coverage through to your website and search
Earned media can send people straight to your website, so look at referral traffic from the publications that covered you and what those visitors went on to do. Did they read more, download a report or get in touch?
PR also supports search. Coverage in respected publications often earns links back to your site, which helps your search visibility, and a good campaign usually lifts branded search too, as more people look you up by name. Your marketing team will already have most of this data in Google Analytics and Search Console, so it's worth agreeing with your agency how you'll share it.
8. Track your visibility in AI answer engines
More and more buyers are asking AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini to recommend suppliers and explain markets. Those answers draw on what's been published about you, and coverage in trusted titles is a big part of that.
Start by listing the questions your buyers are likely to ask, such as which companies lead your category or which suppliers to consider for a particular problem. Check regularly whether your brand appears in those answers, how it's described and which sources are cited. Over time, you should see your earned coverage show up more.
9. Connect PR to pipeline and sales
This is the part every board wants to see, and it's also the hardest to measure precisely. A buyer might read an article, see your CEO quoted in a trade publication months later and then search for you by name before they ever fill in a form.
There are still ways to show the link. You could add a question to your enquiry forms asking how people heard about you. Ask your sales team to note when prospects mention seeing you in the media, and track how often they share coverage with prospects. Look at whether enquiries and branded search rise around big campaign moments. No single measure tells the whole story, but taken together, they can give you a clearer picture of PR’s contribution to the sales pipeline.
10. Measure brand awareness and perception
Longer campaigns need to measure changes in audience perception directly. A short survey of buyers in your market, run at the start of a campaign and again a year later, can show changes in awareness and perception that no coverage report will capture.
This works especially well when the campaign's goal is to change how you're seen, such as moving from a point product to a platform, or establishing yourself in a new sector.
11. Report regularly and use what you learn
Agree how often you'll see results and what each report will cover. Monthly reports work well for tracking activity and coverage, with a quarterly review to examine broader trends and decide what to change.
The best PR reports read like a conversation about the business. They explain what happened, why it matters and what you'll do next. If something isn't working, a good agency will tell you and suggest a change of approach. That's what measurement is for.
Questions worth asking your PR agency about measurement
These questions tend to lead to the most useful conversations:
How will you measure the objectives in our brief?
What baseline will we measure against?
Which competitors and publications will you benchmark us against?
How will you show the link between our coverage and our pipeline?
How will you track our visibility in AI answer engines?
How often will we see results, and what will each report include?
What will you do if the numbers aren't moving?
But remember, the best approach to measurement is built through collaboration. The more insight you can share with your agency, the better it can measure results. Giving your PR team access to website analytics, form submissions or even CRM sales pipelines will help them understand the impact of their work and adapt their approach in real time. Without that visibility, agencies are more reliant on external metrics like coverage volume and share of voice, which only tell part of the story.
How we approach it at Wildfire
At Wildfire, measurement isn’t something we add at the end of a campaign. We build it in from the start. Before any work begins, we agree what PR needs to achieve for your business, set the KPIs that will show whether we’re making progress and establish a baseline to measure against. Our Insight and Strategy team then builds a measurement framework around those objectives, so everyone is clear on what success looks like.
Measurement forms the Impact stage of our Think.Bold methodology. We look beyond how much activity a campaign has generated to understand what has actually changed as a result. Are more of the right people aware of you? Are they thinking about your brand in the way you want them to? And is that translating into meaningful action?
The measures we use depend on the job PR needs to do. That could mean tracking audience awareness and perception, share of voice and key message pull-through, search and AI visibility, website engagement, enquiries or contribution to pipeline. Where we need a clear picture of how a brand is perceived, we can also run bespoke awareness and perception research before and after a campaign to measure what has changed.
And we don’t wait until the end of the campaign to look at the numbers. We review performance throughout, using the findings to sharpen messages, change tactics and put more focus behind the activity that is delivering the strongest results.
Ultimately, we’re not interested in handing you a coverage count and calling it success. A hundred articles mean very little if they don’t reach the people you need to influence or change anything for the business. We want to give you evidence you can use: to demonstrate the value of PR internally, make better decisions about what comes next and show how communications is contributing to your wider business goals.
If you’d like to talk about how to measure your own PR, get in touch. We’d love to hear what you’re trying to achieve.
FAQs
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Choose metrics that connect to your objectives. Common examples include share of voice against competitors, key message pull-through, coverage in your target titles, referral traffic and search visibility from that coverage, visibility in AI answer engines and enquiries from buyers who mention seeing you in the media. Most campaigns are best served by five or six measures tracked consistently.
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Share of voice is the proportion of media coverage in your market that mentions your brand relative to your competitors. It's usually measured across an agreed set of titles and competitors, and it's most useful as a trend over several months.
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Message pull-through measures how often your key messages appear in the coverage you receive. It shows whether journalists are describing your business in the way you want buyers to see it.
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Yes, but how accurately you can measure it depends on the sophistication of your approach and the time and resources you're able to dedicate to it. Some of PR's commercial impact is relatively straightforward to track. You can see when coverage drives people to your website, generates enquiries or influences leads that eventually become customers. But putting a financial value on increased awareness, credibility or reputation is much harder, particularly when these influence buying decisions over months or even years.
That's why it's important to look at the bigger picture. Combining commercial results with indicators like branded search, share of voice and changes in brand perception can help build a more complete picture of PR's value. You won't always be able to attribute a sale directly to PR, but with the right measurement in place, you can demonstrate how it's contributing to wider business goals.
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It depends on your objectives and the scope of the work. Coverage and early activity usually show up within the first few months. Bigger outcomes, such as share of voice, search visibility and influence on your sales pipeline, build over a longer period. Agree milestones with your agency at the start so you both know what to look for and when.
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Monthly reporting works well for most B2B tech campaigns, covering activity, coverage and the measures you've agreed. A quarterly review is a good moment to look at longer-term trends, such as share of voice and brand awareness, and adjust the plan.
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Coverage in respected publications often includes links back to your website, which can improve your search visibility. PR also tends to increase branded search, as more people look you up by name after seeing you in the media. Both can be tracked in Google Search Console and your analytics platform.
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AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini draw on published content when they answer questions, and coverage in trusted titles is a big part of what they cite. Consistent earned coverage makes it more likely your brand appears when buyers ask about your category. You can track this by regularly checking how your brand appears in answers to the questions your buyers ask.
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A good PR report covers what activity took place, the coverage achieved and how it performed against the measures you agreed. It should also explain what the results mean for your objectives and what will happen next. The most useful reports are short and honest about what is and isn't working.
