Sending a press release is a cost. Its results are what other people did with it: who wrote about it, where, how prominently, and whether they told your story or someone else's. That's what's worth measuring.
This guide covers the measures that hold up in front of a client or a board, the ones that don't, and a coverage report template you can copy. It assumes you've already found the coverage – if not, start with how to find out who covered your press release.
Distribution is not a result
A wire service report saying your release appeared on 300 sites is a delivery receipt. Most of those sites republish wire copy automatically, nobody visits them, and nobody chose to cover you.
Results start where an editor made a decision: a rewrite with their own headline, a quote in a feature, a mention in a newsletter they wrote. Count those, and count them separately from the syndication.
Six measures that hold up
Outlets, not articles
Tiers
Message pull-through
Reach, with its source
Markets reached
What happened next
What not to count
- Advertising value equivalents (AVEs). Pricing coverage as if it were ad space. The industry's own measurement body, AMEC, has rejected AVEs since the Barcelona Principles, and most clients who know the term don't trust it.
- Listing pages. Tag pages, year archives, company directories. They match your name because they list everything. If you can't point to a sentence a person wrote about you, it isn't coverage.
- Your own channels. Your newsroom, your social posts and your agency's site are distribution, however well they did.
- Total “potential reach”. Adding up every outlet's audience gives a number in the millions that nobody believes. Report reach per outlet, by tier.
A coverage report template
A good coverage report reads in two minutes and survives a closer look. This structure does both:
- 1Summary. Outlets reached, how many in each tier, the date range, and one sentence on what the release achieved.
- 2Highlights. The three to five best pieces, each with outlet, headline, date and a line on why it matters.
- 3Publications table. One row per outlet, sorted by tier: outlet, country, headline, date, link, reach if you have it.
- 4Message and angle. Which messages came through, which didn't, and what the headlines led with.
- 5Screenshots. One per outlet. Links break and paywalls rise; a screenshot is the proof that lasts.
- 6Social. Posts by outlets and journalists who shared the coverage, kept separate from the press.
- 7What we'd do next time. Two or three lines. It turns a receipt into a plan.
Send it after a week, when the trade-press rewrites have caught up with the wire copy, and update it once more at the end of the month if the story kept traveling.
Common questions
How do you measure the success of a press release?
By the coverage it earned rather than the places it was sent: the outlets that covered it, their tier, whether they carried your message, and what happened afterwards. Set what success looks like before the release – which outlets, which markets – so the result has something to be measured against.
How long after a release should I measure?
Give it a week. The wire copy appears within hours, but rewrites in trade titles and foreign press run days behind, and they're usually the coverage that counts.
What's a good result for a press release?
It depends on the story and the sector, which is why tiers matter more than totals. Two features in the titles your buyers read beat forty reprints on sites they've never heard of.
Which tool should I use?
That depends on how many releases you send and who reads the report. We compared seven in the best press release monitoring tools, and for specialist sectors such as shipping, where coverage lives matters as much as the tool.
Where PressMe fits
You spend the time on what the numbers mean, not on assembling them. See how PressMe works – PressMe has you covered.