At its core, PR reporting is about showing the impact of your hard work.
While daily PR reporting involves the substance of media monitoring, periodic reviews and campaign purges take a step back and look at the broader context, lessons learned and next steps.
Let’s look at examples of both…
Here are five real-life PR reporting examples that stand out for their clarity and focus.
Rise at Seven’s “CEO Friendly One-Page” PR Report
This one-page summary demonstrates high-level results and is ideal for senior stakeholders who need quick insights without getting bogged down in detail.
Key metrics (such as website traffic and sales) are presented through a clear narrative arc: challenge, idea, result.
PR reporting is more than just how many links or reports your campaign received. We have the ability to bring it closer to the overall goals of a brand or business. When we look at reports we focus on rankings, traffic, sales and how many pounds our campaigns ultimately brought in.
focus
Provide a concise overview that executives can quickly digest, focusing on performance highlights and clear ROI.
Cedarwood Digital’s “PR Supplement” Report
This PR report example comes from cedar digital Provides a quick snapshot of digital coverage, demonstrating the campaign’s success in terms of connectivity and authority.
“Supplementary” reporting is useful for clients who don’t need the full PR picture – either because they invest more in other channels, or because reporting is regular enough that they already have the latest situation.
This is an example of a digital PR report that we attach to our SEO reports – we find it to be quite over the top – but it works well for our clients.
focus
Complement wider marketing reporting with concise PR snapshots that highlight key stories.
Distinctly’s “Monthly In-Depth” PR Report
Here’s a great example of a monthly PR report Lauren FieldSenior Digital PR Manager obviouslystarting with an executive summary and next steps, then diving into the campaign, organic visibility, media coverage, and competitor analysis.
It’s clear from the content that the Distinctly team reports results across multiple pipelines and across the entire sales pipeline. If you would like a comprehensive report on your PR performance, please start with Full report here.
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The first page of a PR report needs to be reserved not only for a performance overview, but also to provide immediate next steps for time-pressed stakeholders who need the most important information upfront. This is a great strategy if you’re building reports for multiple audiences.
Kaizen’s “Activity Summary” PR Report Example
This PR report comes from Shakira SachsPR executive improveis a great example of a well-structured activity summary.
For more inspiration, View the full report here.
focus
Follow a clear structure that guides recipients through the campaign’s narrative, and use tools like Canva to create visually pleasing reports that guide the eye.
Escherman’s “Live Report” PR Dashboard
This instant reporting dashboard was created by Andrew Bruce Smith, Eshelman Agency, integrating cross-channel PR metrics such as reach and social shares.
PR dashboards tend not to provide a lot of context to recipients. As such, they tend to be better suited for in-house teams or clients who prefer regular updates and minimal intervention.
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Instant dashboards provide internal teams and engaged customers with insights to instantly adjust campaigns.
Now that you’ve seen some examples of real PR reports, here’s how to build them.
Here’s the TL;DR:
- Focus on a clear goal and keep your reporting simple.
- Customize content, metrics, format and pacing based on your audience
- Don’t overdo it – stick to key insights and advice to keep things clear and actionable.
A good PR report doesn’t overwhelm readers with information. Instead, it focuses on the most important insights and clearly answers a key question. Think of it as a scientific study with a central hypothesis that needs to be tested.
example:
- Are we successfully driving traffic back to our website?
- How much additional visibility have we created with influencers?
- Are we successfully converting awareness into product sales?
Single-minded goals will keep you on track.
When you start building a report, your audience is the most important thing to consider.
Ask yourself: Are they real? need Do you know this? What do they really care about? How do they prefer to consume information?
Doing this will help you build reports that keep your customers coming back.
Different audiences will be interested in different ways of measuring goals. For example, field team More likely to care about fine-grained KPIs, such as the number of dofollow links.
top management or directors, On the other hand, they want to see the top-level impact of your strategy.
They would prefer overall PR KPIs such as share of voice Promote many campaign-related terms.
Even voice lift share at the site level compared to competitors.
The best reports don’t rely solely on numbers—they use charts, graphs, and visuals to tell a story.
If you plan to handle PR reporting yourself, Google Forms or Docs are good options, but they can be a bit limited in design and flexibility.
This is why many PR professionals seek more visual tools, such as viewer studio or canvas.
If your audience is Senior CEOthey typically require a well-designed report with top-level summaries, carefully curated statistics, and performance headers.
client Given that they are not involved in the day-to-day work, a white label report is usually expected that contains a lot of background information on the deliverables and results.
and On-the-ground PR or internal team (Like you) need immediate, detailed reporting to iteratively review and strategize. In-platform profiles, spreadsheets, and Looker dashboards are favorite formats for these important PRs.
Ahrefs’ new PR reporting dashboard is a great example of this. It gives you an instant overview of link and search performance based on your content portfolio, a list of URLs that you specify yourself.
It looks like this:
hint
If you’re not sure how to report for a client, ask them. They may want to see a top-level summary in one section and a performance drill-down in another. While a custom PR template will take you longer to configure, the extra effort is worth it if it makes your clients happy and your agency retained. Besides, there is no time real It would be a waste if you repurposed these templates for other clients and built your own library of PR reports.
Your campaign goals and audience are two major factors that determine the cadence of your reporting.
For example, if you are reporting to other colleagues teamdo so instantly and continuously.
But if you present the results to senior executiveyou’ll analyze this data by month, quarter, year, or even by sales cycle (if that’s how long it takes you to see results).
There is a tendency in PR to over-report. Developing a clear narrative arc will keep you on track.
The best PR reports I’ve seen stick to this loose formula for delivering healthy insights: value.
- Executive summary (overview of goals and activities)
- supreme victory
- Expectations vs. Reality (curated graphics to guide the story)
- Recommendations and next steps
Save these templates to speed up PR reporting – feel free to remove any components that are not relevant to your goals or audience.
PR activity report template
Ready to build your own PR report? This is a simplified template that you can customize for your marketing campaigns…
Ongoing media coverage template
The next PR report template is from Digital PR Lead, Alice Walker Gibbonsfrom embryo digital.
If you’re analyzing the impact of ongoing media reporting, this sample Google spreadsheet will give you some key metrics to consider in your PR reporting.
Quarterly PR Report Template
Alex Jonesdigital supervisor cartwright communications corp.developed a Follow the template This reflects his team’s approach to PR coverage.
This is what he said:
For digital PR reporting, we typically break down monthly and quarterly reports into the following key objectives:
- Number of links
- link quality
- link relevance
- domain rating
- trust flow
We also include voice and sentiment analysis if it helps the client’s goals. We then divided the report into Secondary Shared Goals (SSG):
- keyword/ranking
- Traffic/number of sessions
- Convert
- revenue growth
Essentially, we want to analyze ranking and keyword changes based on the links acquired, and then analyze the impact on traffic and sessions. This may also limit the achievement of goals and any resulting revenue.
Summarize
When it comes to PR coverage, less is more. Keep it clear, focused, and customized to your audience’s needs.
If you’re smart, your PR reports will not only prove the impact of your hard work, but also bring you repeat business, a bigger budget, and more creative control.
So go ahead and bookmark these examples for inspiration.
