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# How to Measure PR and Offline Marketing When You Can't Track the Click

Public relations, radio, outdoor ads, print, events, and podcasts don’t usually let you track clicks straight to a sale. To measure these, start by deciding what you want to change, set a starting point, and then watch for changes in branded search, direct traffic, customer feedback, and sales. You won’t get perfect attribution, but you will collect useful evidence. Writing down what you learn is much better than saying you learned nothing.

Zac | Brandwave co-founder

September 29, 2026

10 min read

## Know what the activity is meant to change

A lot of people do PR and offline marketing simply because they feel they should, without a clear reason. Experienced marketers know these methods can work, but the real challenge is deciding what you want to achieve with them right now.

These activities help raise your business’s profile and build trust and familiarity with your brand or team. That way, when someone needs what you offer, they already think of you. Sometimes this leads to direct sales. For example, when I worked at a large retailer in New Zealand, the head office spent a lot on radio, which worked well during sales events. Other times, the impact shows up as better conversations and easier selling, not just a sudden jump in numbers.

Always decide what result you want before spending any money. Offline marketing is subjective, and people in your organization will have strong opinions about how it should be done and whether it worked. If you write down your goal, audience, and purpose, you can explain why you’re doing the activity and how it supports your sales channels. This should go in your [campaign brief](/blog/marketing-campaign-brief-template.md).

![Brandwave Activities page listing paid ads and creator posts across 15 channels with dates, tracking status, impressions and engagement](/blog/marketing-activities-all-channels.webp)

Offline work only gets measured if it is recorded. Put radio, print, out-of-home and PR coverage in the same activity list as digital, with the dates each one ran.

## The campaign where the proof came up in conversation

At a B2B software company, we used to support only one operating system. People saw us as a product just for Apple users, which limited our growth. When we launched for Microsoft, we placed sponsored content in major industry publications. We already had an audience we could reach, but our main goal was to change how everyone else saw us.

The biggest benefit was word of mouth. Customers started saying, “I heard you’re on Microsoft now,” which was important to them. No one clicked a link from a trade publication and bought immediately. Instead, we saw our message had spread because people repeated it back to us. This is the kind of evidence offline marketing gives you, but it only matters if you keep track of it.

**Key takeaway**

Before you start any offline or PR activity, write down the main thing you want to change and the signs you expect to see if it works. Then, keep track of those signs, including what customers tell you.

## Set a baseline you can see a shift against

Set a starting point for everything before your activity begins: branded search, website traffic, direct visits, and engagement on your other channels. Comparing year over year can be tricky, so use the previous month and adjust for any seasonal changes. Even week by week, you should notice a spike when the activity starts and any changes that follow.

Branded search is the easiest way to see if you’re reaching people and building awareness. It doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy or that you’re reaching the perfect audience. Whether an increase is good depends on your audience size and your whole market. Still, it shows your channel is having an effect.

Direct traffic shows intent. If people are typing your name in, they know about you and want to learn more. Surveys and asking how people heard about you add a qualitative layer, since numbers alone can mislead you about who you reached. You might also see your ads get cheaper or social engagement rise while the activity runs.

| Signal | What it tells you | What it does not tell you |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Branded search lift | People are aware of you and looking you up | That they are in market or that they are the right audience |
| Direct traffic | Intent; people are coming to check you out | What sent them unless you ask |
| How Did You Hear About Us answers | The offline channel in the customer’s own words | The size of the audience that never signed up |
| Surveys | Who you reached and what they took away | Volume; it is a sample |
| Regional comparison | Whether the activity moved one market against another | The exact mechanism |
| Cheaper paid media or more social engagement | Demand is warmer across channels | Which activity warmed it |
| Coverage quality | Whether you reached the audience you intended | Business outcomes on its own |

![Brandwave Intelligence connecting marketing spend, awareness, traffic and signup evidence on one timeline](/blog/influencer-dashboard-spend-results.webp)

To see the impact of an offline activity, put your spending, branded search, traffic, and sign-ups on one timeline. This lets you compare what happened after the campaign to the weeks before.

## Run one city against another

I’ve done this before: choose two similar regions where you want to grow, like two major cities in New Zealand. Run your campaign more strongly in one, then compare the results. This shows you the impact and whether increasing your efforts is still efficient. It’s similar to a holdout test for markets.

The regions you pick need to be similar. If one is already growing faster, you might give the campaign credit for a difference that was already there. Choose places with similar size, starting points, and seasonal trends, and record the baseline for both before you start.

## Coverage quality means reaching the right audience

For PR, quality coverage means reaching the right audience. If you just want to be seen everywhere, you can chase big numbers and spread your message widely. But if you want real results, focus on respected publications and channels your audience actually uses. Targeted coverage is much more effective than trying to be everywhere at once.

That’s why I don’t rely much on earned media value or advertising value equivalents. These only tell you what the ad space would have cost, not what the coverage actually achieved. The PR industry’s own standard, AMEC’s Barcelona Principles 3.0, says in Principle 5: “AVEs are not the value of communication.” Instead, record which outlet covered you, how well it fit your audience, whether it mentioned and linked to your product, and if branded search or direct traffic increased afterward. That’s how you measure quality. A dollar amount tells a different story.

## How to handle lag

Lag can be tricky. You usually know when your campaign went live, so you can look for results in the following weeks or months and compare them to your baseline. But linking a specific piece of coverage to a specific customer is much harder.

What has worked best for me is tracking early sign-ups. If someone signs up for a trial, a premium plan, or a newsletter and says they heard about you from your offline campaign, you have a record. Even if they become a customer months or years later, you can trace it back. Google Analytics or other tracking tools won’t give you this. Asking one question at sign-up is the most valuable thing you can do for offline measurement. The [How Did You Hear About Us guide](/blog/how-did-you-hear-about-us-ga4.md) explains how to set this up.

Some products can’t use this method. If that’s the case for you, rely on your baseline, regional comparisons, and customer conversations. These are still valuable forms of evidence.

![Brandwave chart of weekly sessions with campaign periods shaded and a dotted previous-period line, above a list of moments where results moved](/blog/intelligence-what-ran-what-moved.webp)

Shaded spans show when campaigns ran and the dotted line is the previous period. Lag shows up as movement that begins after a span rather than during it.

## The mistakes I see most

- “We didn’t see a spike, so it didn’t work.” Offline results often show up as better conversations and easier sales. A spike is just one possible outcome.
- “It worked, but we can’t track it.” The result happened, but no one wrote it down. Make sure to record what happens before blaming the channel.
- “I didn’t see it, so I don’t feel like it worked.” Just because one person didn’t notice doesn’t mean it didn’t work. One person’s experience isn’t a measurement.
- Judging a campaign by its creative alone is a mistake. People often decide if they liked the ad and treat that as the result.

The worst mistake is spending a lot and learning nothing. If you’re investing in something you can’t fully track, make sure you learn something from it.

## “We can’t attribute it exactly” is not “we learned nothing”

Attribution isn’t perfect, and people are unpredictable in how they research and buy. Marketing is both an art and a science. You can track everything and still have a bad campaign, because your team, creative work, execution, and understanding of your customer are just as important as the channel you use.

Correlation is useful when you combine it with what you already know and write it down. It’s useless if it just sits in a marketing leader’s head as “trust me.” Stakeholders want visibility and evidence, so log what you ran, when, what changed, what customers said, and what you would do differently. Saying you learned nothing is worse than admitting attribution is incomplete.

**Key takeaway**

Measure every offline activity by setting a clear goal and recording your starting point. Capture what customers tell you and note what changed. Having some recorded evidence is better than chasing a perfect number you’ll never get.

## Offline campaign measurement plan

Use this plan before your campaign starts. For each activity, create a row with its expected change, target audience, baseline period, signals to watch before, during, and after, lag time, comparison region if you have one, an owner, and a column for lessons learned. The example rows show how PR, radio, outdoor, print, events, and podcast sponsorships each fill these in differently.

### Offline campaign measurement plan (CSV)

Import this into Excel or Google Sheets. There are six example rows for PR, radio, outdoor, print, events, and podcasts, plus a blank row you can copy for your own campaign.

[Download template](/blog/offline-campaign-measurement-plan.csv)

Brand-level signals like branded search and Share of Search are explained in the guides on measuring[brand awareness](/blog/how-to-measure-brand-awareness.md) and [Share of Search. For tips on](/blog/share-of-search.md) what counts as real evidence versus a guess, see the guide on [choosing attribution software you can trust](/blog/marketing-attribution-software.md).

I’m building Brandwave because offline and PR activities deserve to be tracked just like everything else you do. You should know what they cost, what they were meant to achieve, what changed, and what customers said. When you put this next to your digital channels, you’ll have a clear answer to whether it worked.

## FAQ

### How do you measure PR?

First, decide what you want your PR coverage to achieve. Set a starting point for things like branded search, direct traffic, and sign-ups. After your coverage appears, check these numbers over the next few weeks. Note which outlets covered you and if they reached your target audience. Ask new customers how they heard about you.

### What are the most useful PR metrics and KPIs?

Check if the outlets that covered you match your audience, mention your product, and include a link. See if branded search and direct traffic go up in the days after. Track 'How Did You Hear About Us' answers at sign-up and watch if those people become customers. Reach and mention counts help, but only when you compare them with these other results.

### How do you measure offline marketing like radio or billboards?

Start by setting a baseline for the month before your campaign. Track branded search and direct traffic every week. Compare results from the area where you ran the campaign to a similar area where you did not. Ask new sign-ups how they heard about you so you can connect later sales to your campaign.

### What is earned media value and should I use it?

Earned media value measures coverage as if you had paid for the ad space. But AMEC’s Barcelona Principles 3.0 say that AVEs do not show the real value of communication. It is better to focus on whether your coverage reached the right audience and what results came after.

### What do PR measurement tools actually measure?

Media monitoring tools count mentions, estimate reach, sort sentiment, and track share of voice. But they do not measure business results. You still need your own baseline, 'How Did You Hear About Us' answers, and a record of what changed to link coverage to real outcomes.

### What should I do if there is no spike after a campaign?

Listen to what customers are saying and notice if sales are getting easier. Offline marketing often gets people ready to buy later, not right away. Your goal will guide what you measure. If you wanted awareness, look for signs of awareness instead of expecting a jump in sales.

## Sources

- [AMEC: Barcelona Principles 3.0 (Principle 5: AVEs are not the value of communication)](https://amecorg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Barcelona-Principles-3-High-Res.pdf): https://amecorg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Barcelona-Principles-3-High-Res.pdf
- [AMEC: Barcelona Principles 3.0 overview](https://amecorg.com/resources/barcelona-principles-3-0/): https://amecorg.com/resources/barcelona-principles-3-0/

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## Give offline activity a record

Brandwave keeps PR, radio, outdoor and event activity alongside your digital channels, with the cost, the goal, the signals that moved and what customers said, so the question of whether it worked has an answer you can show.

[See how Brandwave records every channel](/sign-up)