Where To Find All The Information You Need For A PR Report
Introduction
Creating an earned media report to share your PR wins is hard work. You have to include a lot of information, and the data you need is scattered.
But it is important to track down all relevant information, such as readership and social shares. It shows the success of your work.
In this post we will show you where, and how, to find all the info you need for your PR report. If you also want a step-by-step explanation of how you can create a coverage report, check out this guide.
Below you can see a list of all data we cover in this article. If you are only interested in something specific, you can directly jump to that section by clicking on it.
How to find the publication date of an online article.
Let’s start with the easiest one, finding the publication date of a post or article. You want to include the publication date, so that recipients of your earned media report can easily see how recent the coverage was.
As you know, the date of publication is usually listed at the top of an article. However, this is not always the case. Fortunately there are two tricks you can use to find the date anyway.
The first one is looking at the url. You might see something like yourFavoritePublication/2023-04-19-product-launch. So you know that the post was published on the 19th of April.
If this does not answer the question, you can look at the metadata of the page. Metadata is a fancy word for the info that, in this case, describes the information on a website. Here are step-by-step instructions to view this in any browser:
- Open the website in your favorite browser.
- Right-click on the page (or press Command + Option + I on Mac, or Control + Shift + I on Windows).
- Click the “View Page Source” or “Inspect” option.
- Scroll through the source code and look for the “<meta>” tag.
- The “content” attribute of the “<meta>” tag will contain the publication date of the article.
How To Find Readership Information For Any Publication.
The best way is to find readership estimates depends on where the article, or post, was published. All coverage falls in one of three different categories. We will explain how to find readership for each.
Find Newspaper And Magazine Readership.
Most publications list their readership in every edition. You usually find it on the second page in magazines, or near the back.
Publishers include these stats to attract advertisers. Sometimes they inflate the numbers to make the publication look more attractive. Keep this in mind when using their readership data.
Find Readership Of A Specific Blog.
Just like newspapers, blogs sometimes have a section for advertisers. In this section they provide all types of information, but if you search for “readership” you will not find it. For web traffic this metric is called “unique visitors”, which is the same thing as the readership of the blog.
Blogs with a small audience, or large ones that are ad-free, usually do not provide stats. You can use Similarweb to get a traffic estimate for these sites.
“Readership” Of Social Media Posts.
Posts on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook and other social networks are not always shown to all followers of the poster. Depending on the network you might have to add, or substract, to get to the real readership.
Facebook, for example, charges people to reach all their followers. The result is that most posts are not seen by the entire audience of a creator. To get to real “readership” you have to deduct a % to get to the number of people who will see a post.
This contrasts with the algorithm of media such as TikTok. These networks show videos to many people who do not follow the poster. This discovery function is what makes them so attractive, but that is another topic. For now, know that when a discovery algorithm is present, you should add to the number of followers to get a readership number that accurately reflects readership.
How To Estimate Views Of An Article.
The only way to get the actual number of views is by accessing the analytics system of a website. In most cases, you will not have access, so you will have to make an estimate.
Your estimate of what percentage of the total audience actually saw an article should be based on a number of factors: article size, where it appeared (front page, somewhere more hidden…), whether it was on an even or uneven page, how long it has been visible, and how often it was shared on social networks.
Once you have a percentage you multiply it with the readership to get the estimated number of views. For example, if a publication has a readership of 100k, and you estimate that 12% saw your article, estimated views are 100k * 12% => 12k.
Coming up with the right percentage yourself is tricky. But you have another option. Add all the links to posts you want to quantify results for to ReachReport. The application will then produce an estimate by using an algorithm that takes some of the signals mentioned above into account.
How Often Has An Article Been Shared On Social Media?
It is important to include share stats, because it says a lot about the popularity and reach of your earned media. We will break down how to find the number of shares for each of the major networks below.
Facebook & Pinterest Shares.
The easiest approach is using a free service to check how often an article has been shared both on Facebook and Pinterest. Shareaholic, for example, allows you to paste a link and see how many times it has been shared on both networks.
LinkedIn Shares
LinkedIn used to have a service to search how often a post had been shared. Unfortunately, they decided to stop making this information available.
It is impossible to determine how often an article that was published outside of the network has been shared on Linkedin.
Analytics for posts published on LinkedIn are available, you will see the number of reactions, comments and reposts below each item.
Twitter Shares
How often an article has been shared on Twitter can be quantified, but it is not easy. There are three ways to do this. The first one requires technical knowledge. Twitter has an API with an endpoint that allows you to programmatically retrieve the shared count of a url.
Don’t have the required technical chops, or access to the Twitter API? There is a second option. You can search on a url and manually count how often it was shared. This method is obviously only feasible for articles that were not shared a lot. Counting thousands of tweets is nobody’s dream job.
The third option is to let ReachReport do the heavy lifting. Add all the links to articles you want to include, and the tool will automatically report how often each has been shared.
We hope this overview will help you save time retrieving all the data you need for an earned media report. Please feel free to reach out if there is any information you cannot find. The best email to contact us is in the footer of the page.