Top PR metrics: Making the most of media measurement in 2026

One of the things I regularly get asked in my role as Head of Insight is ‘what are the best metrics to use for measurement?’ or ‘what are the next metrics that we absolutely should be looking at?’. While I don’t believe that there is a single perfect metric that works for everybody, quality metrics are going to continue to be really important in 2026.

Whether that be reputationally thinking about sentiment, or considering the themes or messages that your coverage is carrying through, quality metrics are going to be vital for understanding your position within the media landscape.

Measuring quality in the quantity

With the use of AI and the volume of content going up, everything that’s being published out there isn’t necessarily always of the top quality, or 100% factual.

Making sure that you’re cutting through the noise with quality coverage, and being able to measure that and report it back to your organisation will be key.

Remaining relevant, ensuring that you are being consistent, and keeping it simple will make reports easy to understand, and easy to communicate with your organisation. This will also help with building internal stakeholder trust in your measurement frameworks.

Consider the whole campaign cycle

Measurement isn’t just about recording your results after a campaign. Think about measurement through the entire PR and comms lifecycle.

That means not only using PR measurement and media monitoring in order to retrospectively evaluate your coverage or your campaign, or using it to deliver those metrics to the board or your wider stakeholders on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, but also ensuring measurement is ingrained throughout the campaign lifecycle.

What that looks like is using it to plan for your communications activities. That could be through pre-campaign reports analysing the wider landscape. For example, looking at competitors’ previous launches in order to understand what their messages were, what worked well, and what didn’t work well.

It could be branching out with a wider category of conversation – going beyond your own coverage and your competitors’ coverage to understand the size of the opportunity, then using that data to plan and support your ideas for moving forward.

Benchmarking from the beginning

A wider view also helps to set a benchmark for what might be realistic to achieve with your campaign, or through your communications activity during that period.

Setting up measurement and monitoring for every period means being able to respond to how well things are going quickly. Whether it be with an offshoot campaign, or through general press office, understand what’s working, and what’s not working, rather than waiting right until the very end, and not being able to do anything about it.

The evaluation period

The end evaluation period of a campaign is still important, but that shouldn’t just be, ‘Yes, we did well. No, we didn’t do as well as we had hoped,’ but actually planning for the next time.

Identify what really did work, and what could be carried through next time, what didn’t work so well, and what you can tweak for the future. Work with your insights team in order to understand how you can leverage the best insights from your measurement framework. Because it should be a two-way street for understanding what is important to you – making sure that those insights are relevant to you and can support your work, in that moment, but also moving forward as well.

Insight reporting has traditionally been used to look backwards, but I think it’s really important when planning for the future that that data also has a place at the table.

And remember, just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean you should…

There are going to be a lot of AI metrics coming in in 2026, lots of AI data floating around. My advice would be not to get too swept up in measure for measurement’s sake.

Check that what you’re measuring is relevant to you, that you can measure it consistently, and that those metrics and data are of good quality.

Find out more about Vuelio’s Media Monitoring and Insights solutions.