By Flo Powell, Joint Managing Director, Midnight
How do you solve a problem like digital PR measurement? Last week, I had the great honour of speaking at the world’s biggest search marketing conference, Brighton SEO, about the links between reputation and revenue, the impact of digital PR on business growth and the many ways it can be measured.
There’s a long-standing misconception that PR (and digital PR) only sit at the top of the marketing funnel, driving awareness but offering little that’s measurable. It’s a myth that’s dogged the industry for years and I was glad to stand on the Brighton SEO stage to bust it once and for all.
What do we mean by digital PR?
There’s an ongoing debate about ‘traditional’ versus ‘digital’ PR.
Some still equate digital PR purely with link building – but that’s just one element. Truly effective PR strategies build and protect a client’s reputation. Securing brand mentions and backlinks on high domain authority sites is important, but it’s far from the whole picture.
Midnight was founded in 1995 as the UK’s first PR agency specialising in dotcoms. We’ve been supporting SEO and driving website traffic since the internet was born.
Is all PR digital? Mostly. Agencies like Midnight still secure print, broadcast and podcast coverage – but the majority of our results are online.
What matters is crafting a strategy that fits your business and reaches your target audiences through the channels they actually engage with.
What about digital PR’s link with AI search?
Research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) such as AI Overviews and ChatGPT learn about brands through earned media coverage.
Hard Numbers’ recent study found that 61% of LLM responses about companies stemmed from editorial content – great news for our industry and evidence of PR’s growing influence on AI search results.
That said, a note of caution: while AI search is growing fast, it’s still only a fraction of Google’s total search volume.
The key is to focus on where your audience actually is. Some audiences are more likely to use LLMs than others. We’re seeing a rise in audience research tools that help identify this – useful if you’ve noticed, like many, a drop in Google traffic. Your audience hasn’t disappeared; it’s just scattered across more platforms.
How does reputation link with revenue?
McKinsey & Company found that brands with strong reputations generate 31% more shareholder return on average. Reputation equals revenue.
Conversely, a damaged reputation hurts revenue.
The classic example is Gerald Ratner’s infamous 1991 speech at the Institute of Directors. After mocking his own products and customers, his company’s revenue plummeted by £500m. He’s still on the speaker circuit today – sharing what not to do.
In 2025, it’s impossible to discuss reputation and revenue without mentioning Elon Musk. In March, Tesla lost over $800m in market value – widely linked to Elon’s personal reputation collapse. Ironically, this came after he dismantled his PR team. I call that divine retribution.
The lesson: ensure senior leaders are not only part of the PR campaign but also media trained, aligned on key messages, and prepared for public scrutiny.
And don’t fake it. At the April Brighton SEO conference, advice was given on creating “fake experts” for companies. Bad idea. It angers journalists, risks reputational damage, and could even invite legal trouble.
Click here for our blog about why creating fake experts is a bad idea.
But onwards to more positive things.
How can digital PR support business growth?
PR drives business growth in many ways. I’ve distilled them into seven key areas:
- Increases brand awareness
- Supports SEO and drives website traffic
- Improves share of voice against competitors
- Enhances employer brand and attracts talent
- Attracts investors and supports M&A activity
- Builds brand resilience
- Supports sales and long-term revenue growth
Let’s explore each – and how to measure their impact.
Increases brand awareness
This is what most people associate with PR: sitting at the top of the funnel and helping brands reach new audiences. By expanding that audience, you expand your pool of potential customers.
PR tactics for awareness range from media coverage to thought leadership – across the channels most relevant to your audience.
This blog isn’t long enough to list them all, but you can click here for our B2B PR strategy service or contact us to discuss.
How do you measure brand awareness?
Many assume brand awareness is impossible or too costly to measure. It’s not.
Commission a research company to run a brand awareness survey among potential customers. Once it’s set up, it’s simple to repeat – quarterly is ideal, twice a year works well, and annually is the minimum.
Providers like YouGov, Censuswide, and Trueology offer these services. Costs depend on how niche your target audience is.
An increase in organic traffic or branded searches can also indicate growing awareness, though this is a basic measure compared to brand tracking, which provides far richer insight.
Social listening tools can help too – tracking mentions of your brand across social media to show whether more people are talking about you.
Supporting SEO and driving website traffic
PR has supported SEO since the internet began – we’ve just not always taken credit for it. Midnight, founded in 1995, has made driving web traffic a goal in every campaign since day one.
Today, much of the conversation focuses on digital PR’s impact on AI search – welcome recognition for a discipline that’s been quietly delivering results for decades.
As mentioned earlier, Hard Numbers found that 61% of LLM responses are shaped by earned media. LLMs are learning from press coverage, but traditional SEO benefits too: national media sites all boast domain authorities in the high 90s.
How do you measure digital PR’s impact on SEO?
Look at how your campaign affects website traffic over time. Are there traffic spikes following major coverage or campaign launches? Do referral sources include publications?
A good digital PR agency should also report on the average domain authority of coverage, backlinks, and brand mentions. We use Coverage Book for this, but there are many tools available.
Improving share of voice against competitors
Digital PR helps brands punch above their weight by increasing their share of voice – how often your company is mentioned in the press versus key competitors.
How do you measure share of voice?
You’ll need a media monitoring tool. Most good agencies have one – we use Onclusive. It reports how often your brand and competitors appear in the media, along with which topics, spokespeople and publications are driving mentions.
Pair this with social listening to compare press and social chatter for a fuller view.
Enhancing employer brand and attracting talent
As talent shortages continue, more businesses are using digital PR to enhance their employer brand and position themselves as great places to work.
Research from Michael Page found 60% of organisations struggled to hire in the past year, so this focus is well placed.
How do you measure digital PR’s impact on employer brand?
Start by establishing your baseline:
- How many applications did you receive in recent recruitment rounds?
- What was candidate quality like?
- How much traffic does your careers page get?
After launching an employer brand campaign, analyse coverage volume and quality, traffic to the careers page, and changes in candidate numbers and quality.
It’s also smart to run at least an annual employee satisfaction survey. If results are positive, they’ll strengthen your external messaging. If not – you know what to fix.
Attracting investors and supporting M&A activity
PR often plays a pivotal role in attracting investment or preparing for M&A.
The Business Owners Sentiment Survey found that over 40% of owners have fast-tracked their exit plans in the past year.
We’ve run multiple campaigns supporting this goal – including a five-year partnership with Checkatrade, where we doubled website traffic in year one, boosted member sign-ups, and secured regular national coverage. The brand was ultimately sold for a reported £1bn to HomeServe. See the case study here.
How do you measure digital PR’s impact on M&A?
Start by tracking investor activity: meetings, inbound contacts and visits to a dedicated investor landing page.
Then monitor relevant coverage – volume, titles, domain authority, backlinks and brand mentions – to link PR activity with investor interest.
Building brand resilience
Brand resilience matters. According to the Reputation Institute, 70% of companies can expect to face a PR crisis at some point.
A strong example is M&S, which faced a major cyber-attack but quickly regained customer trust and loyalty – proof of the strength of its reputation.
How do you measure digital PR’s impact on brand resilience?
Use brand tracking to measure perception as well as awareness. Ask your target audience how they view your brand and whether that changes over time.
Add social listening and coverage analysis to gauge how sentiment compares to competitors.
If your company has faced crises, you can also track recovery speed – ideally improving with each incident (though hopefully you won’t need to).
Supporting sales and long-term revenue growth
Digital PR absolutely supports sales and long-term growth – but not in isolation. It works best as part of an integrated marketing campaign.
You won’t see instant sales lifts from day one, but you will see long-term revenue growth as awareness and trust build.
Edelman’s Trust Barometer shows 81% of buyers say brand trust influences purchase decisions, and Page One Power found that people are twice as likely to click on a brand they recognise. More awareness and trust naturally lead to more sales.
Click here for our blog on PR’s impact on financial performance
How do you measure digital PR’s impact on sales?
Understand your customer journey: track lead sources, run customer acquisition surveys and analyse long-term revenue trends.
How can you measure the impact of digital PR?
There’s no single ‘silver bullet’ for measuring digital PR – it depends entirely on your objectives. Start with why you’re investing, then build a measurement framework around that.
At Midnight, our measurement and evaluation are bespoke to each client and campaign because no two objectives are the same.
As a starting point, focus on:
- Press coverage analysis
- Social listening
- SEO analytics
- Brand tracking
These together provide the most complete picture.
I’d love to see more marketing functions sharing data and celebrating collective success. When everyone’s working toward the same goals, collaboration delivers the best results.
Want to know where you stand on digital reputation?
Take our two-minute scorecard quiz: scorecard.midnight.co.uk
Contact us today to discuss how we can support your objectives.
About the author
Flo Powell, Joint Managing Director at Midnight Communications. Flo has 20 years’ experience helping businesses build brand reputation, boost SEO and navigate the fast-changing world of Digital PR. She’s also a frequent speaker on Digital PR in the age of AI.
Click here to download Flo’s slides from Brighton SEO.
Big thanks to Yordan Dimitrov for acting as our official photographer
