In this video, I discuss measuring the share of earned media coverage. While this is similar to measuring share a voice, I believe it’s a better metric to measure the success of your PR program.
What is share of earned media coverage?
Many PR pros use share a voice and share of coverage synonymously. Usually, when calculating share a voice, many will total the number of mentions of a particular brand and calculate that number against its competitors. That was OK to do five, 10, and maybe 15 years ago. But measuring share of coverage is different.
Measuring the share of earned media coverage is strategic. First, it’s determining the data set you want to track your coverage and competitors against. For example, if you have a top 50 media list, you would only pull your coverage from those top 50 media outlets. Or, it could be just business, tech, or trade media. You would do the same when pulling competitive coverage. This technique is meant to show quality earned media coverage versus quantity. Sometimes you might want to pull a specific share of coverage by each industry media. This can help put some strategic focus on where you want to get coverage in the future.
Another way to measure the share of earned media coverage is by unique mentions. Using this approach, you would use the desired data set but exclude any competitive mentions. So your boolean query might look something like this:
(“my brand” OR “my product” OR “my executive”) AND NOT (“competitor A” OR “competitor B” OR “competitor C”)
However, when using this approach, you must exclude your brand and company keywords when pulling competitive coverage.
The last example I want to give is to measure the share of coverage by engagement. You would follow all of the steps mentioned above but replace the volume of coverage metric with the volume of engagement metric. Most media monitoring and analysis tools will show how many total engagements per article.
I have seen this happen before, where one company will have a higher volume of coverage, but competitors will have a much higher engagement on that coverage. This tells me that the coverage resonated more with that readership than the former.
Related Videos: