Can we integrate PR when measuring the effectiveness of media?

“We were able to gain an even better insight in the impact of our media by not only looking at paid media but adding owned and earned media into the mix as well.”

DVJ developed a new innovative measure for media contacts to analyse the impact of media channels: The Reality Performance Score. RPS is a new KPI that represents the real number of contacts brands have with consumers. RPS compares each media to another and evaluates them. It weighs each media differently based on the opportunity people have to engage with that medium. RPS looks at the decay effect of advertising memory and integrates the strength of the medium. RPS looks back at the number of contacts from last week and ads a part of that to this week. As a result, RPS is the first real KPI that represents the total sum of all media.

Client’s challenge

For different clients DVJ is working on understanding the effectiveness of media related to marketing KPI’s. We focus on paid media and try to understand when paid media is most effective. However, there are different types of media that are also generating contact with the brand, like PR. So, the question remains; How do we add PR to other (paid) media channels? If we are able to integrate PR as a way to understand the total numbers of contact a brand has, we will have more control on how to plan campaigns and take PR into account.

The case

Different clients of DVJ that conduct tracking are confronted with the positive and negative effects of PR and would like to add PR contacts to the overall number of paid contacts. For measuring the overall level of contacts, a brand has during a week, DVJ developed RPS. A new and innovative KPI that can be used to optimize media investments week by week. If you want to know more about RPS, you can read the blog here.

Our clients want to understand if we could improve RPS by integrating other elements like owned and earned media. The position of a brand can be significantly impacted by PR. For example:  The position of Samsung and competitors are influenced by the announcement of new models or PR related to malfunction. Also, the popularity of a theme park like The Efteling, is influenced when a new attraction is announced.

The approach

DVJ looked at the continuous trackers and developed the possibility to add PR contact to the total numbers of contacts measured via RPS. We needed causality and enough data. That is why we followed a stepwise approach:

• For a lot of different brands, we have calculated a weekly RPS based upon media schedules
• We also calculated the weekly number of contacts coming from PR for the same brand. This data came from another data source, namely weekly tracking of PR data.
• We needed to find a beta factor that represents the strength of PR relative to other media
• We needed weekly tracking data to understand the impact of this new KPI for all contacts
• We needed to validate if we could add PR and how to integrate sentiment

Adding PR to the overall level of paid media contacts is possible if we follow these steps. We could add PR to the overall level of paid media as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The results

With all this data we were able to determine the beta factor of PR. With this beta factor we were able to add the PR contacts to the total number of paid media contacts. In addition, we also integrated the sentiment of the PR, both positive and negative. We learned that with adding PR, we’re able to predict different KPI’s better. We’re able to find a strong correlation between KPI’s.

RPS+ has a positive correlation on website visits, Facebook-engagement and YouTube-views as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

Now we are able to integrate the direction of PR in the context of media. This has an improvement of correlation between RPS and KPI’s. It has a positive effect on advertising recognition, spontaneous brand awareness, consideration and preference. It creates new possibilities to see how paid media and earned media can work together in realising the marketing objectives of each client.

Client’s benefit

With RPS+ we are able to give our clients insight in what the impact is of paid and earned media combined, on sales and marketing KPI’s. We help them further optimise their future media to expand the impact of their KPI’s. It helps in understanding how necessary additional paid media contacts are if there is a lot of PR around a certain event.