Endless tools, frameworks and metrics promise to prove PR’s value. But B2B tech companies aren’t trying to reach as many people as possible. They’re trying to influence a relatively small group of people who shape decisions: buyers, investors, analysts, journalists, partners and industry experts.
The real questions B2B tech companies should ask are therefore not simply: How much coverage did we get? How many impressions did we generate?
They are: Are we becoming better known among the people who matter? Are our messages sticking? Are we building authority? Are we gaining ground on competitors? Are we becoming associated with the topics we want to own?
We wanted to understand how other PR agencies are approaching this challenge. Through our international network Convoy, we asked ten agencies from Sweden, Germany, the Middle East, Benelux, South Africa, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Poland and Brazil about how their B2B tech clients measure PR today and what they think needs to change.
Here’s what they told us.
Expectations are changing. But the measurement hasn’t caught up
The first thing that stands out is that clients’ expectations around PR measurement are changing. Thirty percent of the respondents said their B2B tech clients’ expectations had changed significantly over the last two to three years. The other seventy percent said they had changed “somewhat”. So, there is clear movement.
When we looked at what clients measure today, the old metrics are still firmly in place. All of the agencies said they measure reach and impressions. Eighty percent said they measure coverage volume. Ninety percent measure share of voice, fifty percent use sentiment analysis, and sixty percent use competitor benchmarking. Only thirty percent said their clients are currently measuring message penetration.
The industry is talking about moving towards more meaningful measurement, but most reporting still focuses on what is easiest to count: how much coverage was generated and how many people might have seen it. In other words, we are still largely measuring activity rather than impact.
Most agencies don’t think B2B tech companies are measuring PR effectively
One of the clearest findings came from the following question: Do you think most B2B tech companies are measuring PR impact effectively today?
Only one agency said yes. Three said no. And six said they weren’t sure. That means ninety percent of the respondents either don’t believe the industry measures PR effectively or don’t feel confident it does. That raises an obvious question: if the industry isn’t confident in the way it measures PR today, why are we still relying so heavily on the same metrics?
The biggest problem: proving a connection to business outcomes
When we asked about the biggest barrier to proving PR impact, four agencies said the greatest challenge was tying PR to business outcomes. Three said it was a lack of agreement about what success actually looks like. Two pointed to a lack of the right evaluation tools.
Several agencies highlighted a common challenge: while organisations recognise that PR contributes to business outcomes such as brand awareness, reputation, demand generation and sales, demonstrating the direct impact of communications activities on these outcomes remains difficult. As Jan Fredriksson of Northern Link PR in Sweden noted: “The effects of PR cannot be measured accurately without talking to end customers before and after a campaign.”
“The effects of PR cannot be measured accurately without talking to end customers before and after a campaign.” – Jan Fredriksson, Northern Link PR
When the impact of communications on reputation, influence and long-term consideration is difficult to quantify, measurement tends to focus on more readily available indicators, such as media coverage, impressions, reach and share of voice. The challenge is to develop more meaningful ways of capturing PR’s broader contribution to business performance.
The old metrics are failing, but the new ones aren’t ready
While companies largely rely on the same traditional metrics, there is no consistent approach to what comes next. One respondent described the industry as being “stuck” between legacy metrics and rushed attempts to introduce AI-driven metrics that aren’t necessarily mapped to meaningful outcomes.
AI itself is creating a new measurement challenge. As AI transforms how people find information and reduces the visibility of traditional publisher websites, clients are becoming more concerned about where their brands appear and how they are presented in these environments.
Most agencies are already having conversations about GEO (generative engine optimisation) as a potential PR metric.
So the old metrics don’t really tell us what we want to know, while some of the new metrics haven’t yet established what they should tell us.
Quality matters more than quantity, and bigger media doesn’t automatically mean better PR
Another strong theme was the tension between quantity and quality and a related misconception about what successful PR actually looks like.
Ronelle Bester of South African PR agency Red Ribbon Communications observed that “some clients still equate success with having their brand mentioned in headlines, rather than focusing on how their messages and expertise can be communicated more subtly and effectively through earned media.”
The team from the Poland-based agency PR Solutions would “like to see a much stronger connection between PR metrics and actual business objectives. Instead of reporting mainly on outputs such as media coverage, reach or share of voice, PR measurement should show how communications contribute to broader goals, for example, building brand awareness and credibility, supporting sales and lead generation, or strengthening relationships with key audiences.”
All agencies we spoke to challenged the assumption that more media coverage automatically translates into better PR results. While coverage in top-tier publications can be valuable, its impact ultimately depends on factors such as audience relevance, the quality of the coverage and how effectively it conveys the company’s core messages.
The focus, therefore, should be on the quality and strategic value of coverage, rather than volume or media tier alone.
The issue is not that reach or coverage volume are irrelevant. They just don’t tell us enough on their own. A high-volume campaign can look impressive in a report without necessarily strengthening a brand’s position, while a smaller number of highly relevant pieces can contribute significantly to credibility, authority and influence.
Successful PR is therefore less about collecting media trophies and more about building a position. And that position rarely happens overnight. Several respondents highlighted the danger of expecting immediate results from a relatively small investment in a process that needs to be broad and long-term. Effective PR can require sustained activity, strong local media relationships, strategic partnerships and other supporting activity.
The challenge, then, is not simply generating more coverage or reaching bigger audiences, but finding ways to distinguish between activity that looks impressive and activity that actually moves the needle. As Deborah Gray from Canela, the Iberian public relations agency, put it: “Reporting should provide an overview of both quantitative and qualitative results.”
“Reporting should provide an overview of both quantitative and qualitative results.” – Deborah Gray, Canela
PR isn’t a sales shortcut and impact takes time
Some organisations still expect “immediate results from a process that actually needs to be broad and long-term,” deplores Stefania Trazzi of the Italian PR agency Imageware, confirming that this expectation clashes with how PR actually works.
As Rafaël Tirmarche of the Belgian PR and communications agency Factivity put it: “Many people link the consistency and impact of PR to an indefinable increase in sales or contact requests. However, no sales representative will ever attribute a lead to PR or an MQL.”
PR can build credibility, authority, familiarity, and trust. It can influence the narrative around a category and strengthen the position of a company or spokesperson with the people who matter. And, ultimately, it can make sales conversations easier.
That doesn’t mean PR shouldn’t contribute to commercial results. Quite the opposite. It means we need to understand the journey between communications activity and those results, rather than expecting every piece of coverage to produce an immediate sale.
PR is “a brand awareness service. It is about owning the narrative and being influential,” Rafaël Tirmarche emphasises. Sales may ultimately follow that influence, but measuring PR purely through immediate sales would miss much of the value created along the way.
What PR measurement needs to become
PR has never lacked metrics. But for some time, we have been exploring whether the metrics we commonly use give us the clearest possible picture of what PR actually achieves.
Before developing a new approach, we wanted to understand whether practitioners across different markets were experiencing the same challenges. The responses of our partner agencies provided a valuable perspective across markets.
Perhaps the most interesting finding was how little disagreement there was.
Agencies largely agree that PR measurement needs to become more meaningful. They agree that business outcomes matter. They agree that quality matters. And they recognise the importance of reputation, authority and influence.
The challenge is getting there.
Metrics such as reach, volume and engagement can tell us what happened. But they do not necessarily tell us whether the right audiences were reached, whether the intended messages landed, whether perceptions shifted, or how the quality of coverage contributed to meaningful outcomes.
There is also no universally accepted way to connect communications activity to those longer-term effects. Clients may not have the data or internal processes to make that connection, while agencies understandably tend to fall back on metrics they know they can defend.
That is the measurement paradox: measuring activity is relatively straightforward; demonstrating meaningful impact is much harder.
So what should change?
When we asked agencies what single thing they would change about how the industry measures and reports PR impact, one theme stood out: stop measuring what is easy to count and start measuring what actually matters.
Patrik Schober, managing partner of the Prague-based public relations and marketing communications agency PRAM Consultants would like to ensure that “everyone adheres to the Barcelona Principles”, a framework for evaluating PR and communications more meaningfully, shifting the focus from how much PR activity is generated to what difference that activity actually makes.
That does not mean abandoning reach, coverage or share of voice. These metrics still have a role to play. They can tell us whether activity is happening and whether visibility is increasing. But they should not be the end of the story.
As Nick Leighton from NettResults in the UAE put it: “I’d make PR stop trying to prove its value by counting things nobody in the boardroom actually cares about. Impressions aren’t impact, and coverage isn’t automatically influence. PR measurement should answer one question: What changed because of the work? Did more of the right people know, trust, consider or talk about us? Did we strengthen our reputation, create demand, influence a market or make the sales team’s job easier? Measure movement, not activity. Because if our biggest achievement is 84 million ‘potential impressions,’ we may have impressed ourselves more than anyone else.”
“I’d make PR stop trying to prove its value by counting things nobody in the boardroom actually cares about. Impressions aren’t impact, and coverage isn’t automatically influence” – Nick Leighton, NettResults
His point captures the broader direction emerging from the research. But the challenge is not only deciding what to measure. It is also connecting those measurements to the wider business. Vania Gracio, CEO of São Paulo-based PR agency Sing Comunicação, argues that PR data should increasingly be integrated with marketing and sales systems, allowing companies to examine whether media visibility is associated with leads, pipeline development or changes in brand consideration. She also points to reputation and brand-lift studies as tools that should become a more established part of the measurement toolkit, rather than something companies commission only occasionally.
The opportunity is not to discard traditional metrics, but to put them in context. It means moving beyond activity and towards outcomes; balancing quantity with quality, reach with reputation, coverage with message penetration, and media metrics with business objectives.
It also means accepting that the most valuable effects of PR may not appear in a dashboard the day after an article is published. Changes in reputation, authority, perception and influence can take time to develop, and their relationship to business outcomes is rarely linear. The team at Northern Link PR believes that “AI could lead to more intelligent measurements”, potentially making it easier to capture the broader, longer-term impact of PR.
The bigger opportunity
If B2B technology PR is ultimately about influencing the people who shape markets and buying decisions, then the next generation of measurement needs to tell us more than how much activity we generated.
It needs to help us understand whether we are reaching the right people, whether our messages are penetrating, whether perceptions are changing, whether authority is being built and whether influence is growing.
Ultimately, it needs to help answer a bigger question: is PR helping the business move forward?
That is a shift from measuring activity to understanding impact.
From insight to action
This is the challenge that sits behind DRIVE, our proprietary PR evaluation platform.
We have been developing DRIVE as one practical response to the measurement gap identified through our own work and reinforced by this research.
Rather than simply measuring how much PR is being generated, DRIVE is designed to assess the quality and potential impact of coverage, looking at signals including relevance, message penetration, sentiment and authority.
The ambition is not to suggest that the metrics agencies use today are wrong, or that there is one definitive way to measure PR success. It is to add another dimension to the conversation: how can we move from measuring PR activity to understanding PR impact?
Our partners helped us test whether the challenge we were trying to solve was shared beyond our own experience. Their perspectives reinforced that it is a question worth addressing and one that the industry should continue to explore together.
The opportunity now is to build on that shared understanding and develop measurement approaches that are not only more sophisticated, but more useful: approaches that connect the quality of communications with the changes they are intended to create.
Because the future of PR measurement is not about having more metrics.
It is about better understanding what those metrics mean and what changed because of the work.
Want to know exactly where you stand? We’re opening a small number of free Brand Impact Audits for b2b tech companies. [Learn more.]
