Despite PR industry demands for a measurement and evaluation standard over many years, nothing has emerged beyond the dreaded – and now thankfully discredited – ‘advertising value equivalent’ (AVE).  There is now, however, a metric that I believe meets all the necessary criteria to become a true and proper industry standard, which not only enables all PR activities to be measured and compared with each other but also with any other form of marketing and communication activity.

That metric is Internet search.  Let me offer ten reasons why I believe Internet search should become the standard measure for the PR – and indeed other – marketing industries:

1.       Internet search is the most important source of information for the vast majority of people across all audience types, making it a ‘critical’ measure of fundamental importance to communication and marketing activities

2.       It is easy to understand

3.       It does not vary according to how it is measured

4.       It is universal and readily available to and easily accessible by anybody and everybody on a global basis

5.       It is free

6.       It is a measure of outcome, not output

7.       It can be measured geographically and will, increasingly, be measured demographically

8.       Changes can be measured over small time intervals

9.       Data is available quickly

10.    Data is the same regardless of what it is driven by, from (different) marketing activities to natural causes

Of course, there are inevitably some downsides, but relatively few.  Some, for instance, will say that searches could be automatically generated, but any metric is open to misuse; and, in any event, search capture and analysis will continue to become increasingly sophisticated and correspondingly harder and harder to abuse.