How We Gave a Client More KPIs and Gave Ourselves Less Responsibility

A client recently came to me asking for KPIs. We were happy to provide the information, except that some of the KPIs they wanted, like “number of media outlets pitched,” were ridiculous.

But our point of contact, the marketing director, was under pressure from the CEO to prove the value of the public relations campaign. Not because we were doing a bad job, but because the company was having cash flow problems, and suddenly every dime was important.

The good news is that we had developed a rapport with the marketing director. In the course of asking a few questions, we were able to identify the KPIs that mattered most to her, add more KPIs than we were originally willing to provide, and put most of them back on her because she already had the data.

She just didn’t know it.

Why They Sucked

The metrics the client wanted are exactly the kind you’d expect:

• Number of media outlets contacted

• Number of media outlets covering the company

• Brand mentions

• Industry mentions

• Share of voice

We flatly refused to count the number of media pitches. The analogy I should have used came after the conversation: Which is more important to a CEO, the number of cold calls a salesperson makes or the number and quality of deals closed?

In PR, which is better, ten thousand pitches and one placement, or five pitches and five placements?

For this client, even some normal industry metrics didn’t matter. Share of voice, for example, is irrelevant for a company with a very modest PR investment, where most of the reputation is built offline through business development, filling out government RFPs, and existing customer relationships. Additionally, the company name happens to be identical to a commonly used infrastructure term.

It would be like asking, “How many times did the word ‘building’ show up in the press last week?”

“PR has never been measured by one perfect KPI,” said Linda Zebian, VP of Communications for Muck Rack. “Impressions make for useful context, but they don’t tell you whether you reached the right audience or advanced the goals of the campaign. The number of media hits doesn’t matter if they are the wrong ones. With AI, everyone wants to know how many times their brand shows up, but that’s only a starting point. The best measurements come from combining multiple indicators to tell a story about business impact.”

I didn’t have Linda’s advice when we spoke to the client. But, no irony intended, that’s exactly what we did. We made a business case for each recommended KPI, walking through the journey of effort used, results generated, and how those results reduced costs or improved the sales pipeline.

What Works Better

First, we tracked placements across local, trade, and national media over the same period as the previous year. That showed whether visibility was even happening. (We cheated a little. They had zero press the prior year.)

Second, we tracked industry placements that reached the client’s government contractor and corporate buyers.

Third, we asked key questions about cost reductions created by earned media. Every quality placement became ready-made material for blogs, newsletters, email campaigns, and social media. The client’s content team normally takes two hours to write a blog post; earned media cut that time in half, at least, and created similar time savings on social media posts.

That’s not simply a communications win for your side. It’s an operational efficiency for their side that saves time across the entire department.

Fourth, they took our advice and began tracking newsletter and social clicks from content highlighting earned media in the following ways:

• What were the number and quality of clicks?

• Where did those clicks go?

• How did the number and quality of clicks compare with non-earned media content?

This wasn’t about driving traffic to placements we landed at industry trade outlets, the Financial Times, or USA TODAY. It was about seeing how their content about earned media success created, or didn’t create, traffic from their ideal customers and where that traffic went, ideally to the company website.

Fifth, when we asked about use outside the marketing team, the client said the sales and business development teams were using placements in their conversations. This provided another important KPI: earned media doesn’t stop working once an article is published or a podcast goes online. It becomes collateral that supports prospect and customer conversations long after reporters move on to the next story.

Think of more focused KPIs as scattering seeds into good ground. You’re not a lonely PR silo anymore. Suddenly, you’re contributing measurable value to marketing, sales, business development, and executive leadership. Now the departments are integrating, communicating, and raising the whole above the sum of its parts.

Building Trust So Bad KPIs Aren’t the Norm

The story sounds great, right? But it’s only replicable on a foundation of trust. If I’d tried it out of the gate, I would have been shown the door. It was only after fostering a trust-based relationship with the client that I could dump all over their KPIs. My colleague and I had positioned ourselves to help them ask better questions, rather than dictate that they were asking the wrong ones.

As I mentioned, our final reporting package included more KPIs than we were initially going to provide. (Again, tracking the number of pitches is work we’ll never do.) We weren’t just trying to get out of doing work. Now each KPI had a purpose, helping leadership understand how communications affected the broader business.

And maybe most importantly, each one gave the marketing director a confident, data-backed framework she could present to the CEO instead of simply defending communications on instinct.

It’s understandable to fall into reporting data as a rote means of self-preservation. Give ’em the numbers they want, and then get back to work, at least today, since bad KPIs could lead to getting fired tomorrow.

But the best PR reporting doesn’t exist to satisfy a dashboard. It exists to help leaders make better decisions. That’s a much more valuable point of focus than the number of pitches you happened to send last month.