Measurable PR Goals: Stop Measuring Activity, Start Measuring Outcomes

Measurable PR goals are specific, time-bound targets that connect communications activity to business outcomes, not just media coverage. The difference between a PR goal and a PR metric is accountability: a goal tells you whether the work moved the needle, a metric just tells you it happened.

Most PR measurement frameworks collapse at the point where they should be most useful. They count outputs, report them upward, and call it performance. This article is about building something more honest than that.

Why PR Measurement Has a Credibility Problem

When I was running an agency that had been losing money for years before I took over, one of the first things I did was audit what we were actually reporting to clients. PR reports were among the worst offenders. Thick decks full of coverage clips, reach estimates, and AVE figures (advertising value equivalents, the industry’s most enduring piece of fiction) that told clients almost nothing about whether the work was doing anything commercially useful.

The problem was not that the teams were lazy. The problem was structural. Nobody had ever forced the question: what does good look like, and how would we know if we got there? Goals had been set as activity targets rather than outcome targets, and the reporting infrastructure had been built to service those activity targets. The whole system was internally consistent and externally meaningless.

Forrester has written about this tension, noting that communications functions often measure from the inside out, reporting on what they did rather than on what changed as a result. That framing is useful because it identifies the directional problem: measurement should face outward toward business impact, not inward toward team activity.

If you want to understand how PR fits into a broader communications and marketing strategy, the PR and Communications hub covers the full picture, from planning through to execution and measurement.

What Does “Measurable” Actually Mean in a PR Context?

Measurable does not mean precise. This is a distinction the industry consistently gets wrong, and it causes real damage. Teams chase precision in metrics that cannot be precisely measured (earned reach, sentiment shift, brand awareness) and in doing so produce numbers that look authoritative but are largely constructed.

An honest approximation of truth, presented as an approximation rather than gospel, is more useful than most of what passes for PR measurement right now. If your share of voice in a relevant media category increased from roughly 8% to roughly 14% over a quarter, that is a meaningful directional signal. You do not need it to be accurate to two decimal places. You need it to be directionally reliable and consistently measured.

Measurable, in practice, means:

• You defined the metric before the campaign started, not after
• The data source is consistent across measurement periods
• The metric connects to something the business cares about
• You can distinguish between a result driven by PR and one driven by other factors, even if imperfectly

That last point is the hardest one. PR rarely operates in isolation. Coverage spikes, brand search lifts, and referral traffic bumps are influenced by everything from paid media to seasonal demand. The goal is not to claim sole credit. The goal is to build a consistent enough picture over time that the contribution of PR becomes visible.

Where Moz Fits Into PR Goal-Setting

If you have landed on this topic partly because you are thinking about digital PR and SEO, the Moz connection is worth addressing directly. Moz metrics, particularly Domain Authority and the link profile data in Link Explorer, have become a common way to measure the SEO impact of PR activity. And that is legitimate, with caveats.

Digital PR, when it earns links from editorially relevant, high-authority publications, does move organic search performance. That is not a theory. It is observable in site-level data over time. Domain Authority as a metric is a Moz-specific proprietary score, not a Google signal, but it correlates well enough with actual link quality to serve as a useful proxy when you are tracking the cumulative effect of an earned media programme.

The trap is treating DA improvement as the goal rather than as an indicator. A PR programme that chases DA points by placing content on low-quality sites that happen to have inflated authority scores is optimising for the proxy, not the outcome. I have seen this happen repeatedly in agencies where the SEO team and the PR team are measured separately and have no shared definition of what a good link actually means.

Useful Moz-adjacent metrics for digital PR goal-setting include:

• Number of referring domains from target publication tiers (defined before the campaign)
• Organic visibility change for target keyword clusters over a rolling 90-day period
• Link quality distribution across authority bands, not just total link count
• Brand mention volume in indexed content, tracked via tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush

None of these replace the harder question of whether PR is driving commercial outcomes. But they give you a more honest picture than AVE, and they connect earned media activity to something a performance marketing team or a CFO can understand.

How to Build PR Goals That Actually Hold Up

The structure I have used across multiple agencies and client engagements starts with the business objective and works backward. It sounds obvious. In practice, most PR goal-setting starts with what the PR team can control and works forward. Those are opposite directions and they produce very different goals.

Start with the business objective. Not the marketing objective. The business objective. Revenue growth, customer acquisition cost reduction, market share in a specific segment, talent attraction, investor confidence. PR can influence all of these, but only if the goals are scoped against them from the beginning.

From the business objective, identify the communications outcomes that would plausibly contribute to it. If the objective is entering a new market, the communications outcomes might include establishing credibility with that market’s media ecosystem, building brand recognition among a new audience segment, and generating inbound enquiries from that geography. These are still outcomes, not tactics.

From the communications outcomes, define the metrics. This is where most teams start, which is why most PR goals are weak. If you define metrics before you define outcomes, you will default to what is easy to measure rather than what matters.

A simple structure that works in practice:

• Business objective: Increase qualified pipeline from the financial services sector by 20% over 12 months
• Communications outcome: Establish the brand as a credible voice in financial services trade media
• PR goal: Secure 15 pieces of coverage in Tier 1 financial services publications within 6 months, with at least 8 including a named spokesperson quote
• Supporting metric: Track branded search volume from financial services-related queries using Google Search Console

That chain is traceable. It is not perfectly attributable. But it is honest, and it gives both the PR team and the business something real to work toward.

The Tier System: Not All Coverage Is Equal

One of the most useful things you can do before setting PR goals is define your publication tiers. This is basic, but it is skipped more often than it should be. Without tiers, a piece of coverage in a niche trade publication and a piece in a national broadsheet count the same in your reporting. They should not.

Tiers should be defined by relevance to your audience, not just by domain authority or circulation. A Tier 1 publication is one your target buyer actually reads and trusts. A Tier 3 publication is one that might be useful for link building but is not going to shift perception among the people you are trying to reach.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, we had to get much more deliberate about how we positioned the business in the market. We defined a shortlist of publications where our target clients, mid-market and enterprise marketing directors, actually went for information and opinion. Coverage in those publications was worth ten times what we were getting from broader trade press. Restructuring our PR goals around that tier system changed what the team prioritised and changed what we reported. It also made the PR function look considerably more commercially useful than it had before.

Tools like Sprout Social can help track brand mentions and coverage distribution across channels if you are managing PR alongside social media, which increasingly you are. The value is in having a consistent data layer rather than pulling manually from different sources each month.

Audience Insight as a Goal-Setting Input

PR goals that are set without audience data are essentially guesses about what will land. Audience insight does not have to be expensive or elaborate. It does have to be honest.

What does your target audience read? Where do they form opinions? Which spokespeople or organisations do they find credible? What do they already believe about your brand, if anything? These questions should inform both the goals you set and the metrics you choose to track progress.

Behavioural data tools like Hotjar are more commonly associated with UX and conversion work, but the underlying principle applies to PR planning too: look at what people actually do and respond to, not just what they say they do. If your post-coverage traffic data shows that visitors arriving from earned media are bouncing faster than paid traffic, that is a signal that the PR messaging and the on-site experience are misaligned. That is a goal-setting insight, not just a UX problem.

Integrating PR Goals With the Wider Marketing Measurement Stack

PR goals that exist in isolation from the rest of the marketing measurement framework are always vulnerable. When budget pressure arrives, and it always arrives, the functions that cannot connect their activity to shared business metrics are the first to be cut or reduced.

I have sat on both sides of that table. As an agency CEO managing a P&L under pressure, I made decisions about where to cut based on what could be defended with data and what could not. PR was not always well-positioned to defend itself, not because the work was not valuable, but because the measurement framework was not built to make the value visible.

The practical fix is to connect PR reporting to the metrics that the wider marketing team is already tracking. If the marketing team is reporting on branded search volume, include that in PR reporting. If they are tracking referral traffic by source, make earned media a visible source category. If pipeline attribution is being tracked in CRM, flag when PR coverage precedes a contact’s first website visit.

None of this is perfect attribution. But it builds a pattern over time that makes the PR contribution visible to people who are not PR specialists. That visibility is what protects PR budgets and earns PR teams a seat at the strategy table.

For a broader view of how communications planning fits within an integrated marketing operation, the PR and Communications section of The Marketing Juice covers everything from strategy foundations to measurement frameworks in more depth.

What to Do When the Data Does Not Tell a Clear Story

Sometimes it does not. Coverage ran, the data is ambiguous, and there is no clean signal pointing to PR as the driver of whatever changed. This is normal. It is not a reason to fabricate clarity.

The honest approach is to report what you can see, note what you cannot attribute with confidence, and build the measurement infrastructure to answer the question more clearly next time. That means setting up tracking before the next campaign, not retrofitting it afterward. It means agreeing baselines at the start of a programme, not hunting for a flattering comparison point at the end.

The Effie Awards process, which I have judged, is instructive here. The cases that win are not the ones with the most impressive numbers. They are the ones that tell a coherent, honest story about what the work set out to do, what it actually did, and how they know. Ambiguity acknowledged and addressed is more credible than certainty that does not hold up to scrutiny.

PR reporting should work the same way. The goal is not to look good in a deck. The goal is to give decision-makers an accurate picture of what is working, what is not, and what to do differently.

A Note on Benchmarking and Competitive Context

PR goals set without competitive context are harder to interpret. If your share of voice in a category dropped from 18% to 14%, that looks like a failure. If every competitor dropped by more than you did during the same period, it might represent relative strength. Context matters.

Competitive benchmarking does not need to be exhaustive. Pick three to five direct competitors and track them consistently. Share of voice in target publications, spokesperson visibility in relevant media, and earned link acquisition from authoritative sources are all trackable at a competitive level without needing enterprise-grade tooling.

The BCG framing of operating in a two-speed economy is a useful lens here. In competitive markets, standing still is effectively moving backward. PR goals need to account for what competitors are doing, not just what your own programme is achieving in absolute terms.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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