It’s a question that is the bugbear of clients and PR agencies alike, but for entirely different reasons – what’s the best way to gauge whether a PR campaign is working?

It’s fair to say that the benefits of PR aren’t always directly quantifiable. Estimating the reach of a campaign can be tricky at the best of times, not least in the fields of traditional and print PR – you may know that the industry magazine you’ve just sent an article to has a circulation of ten thousand, but if a quarter of all those magazines are sent to a workplace where they are passed around the staff, how many pairs of eyes have seen that article? Suddenly, the reach of your campaign becomes much harder to quantify – in that example, the total reach of the campaign is likely to be significantly higher than the measurable figures suggest.

This, of course, is another reason why venturing into the world of digital PR opens up so many possibilities. Not only is it possible to reach a vast audience this way but metric tools like Google Analytics make it much easier to assess their engagement with your campaign, too.