Measuring the value of public relations has long been a challenge for PR professionals. Traditional metrics like Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) aimed to simplify reporting by equating earned media coverage to the cost of equivalent paid advertising. But as the media landscape has evolved, the limitations of AVE have become increasingly apparent. Today’s environment demands more nuanced, flexible metrics that reflect the real impact of PR activity — and that’s where PR Custom Scoring comes in.
Table of Contents
The Limitations of AVE and the Need for Better PR Metrics
The problem with one-size-fits-all PR measurement
Enter PR Custom Scoring: A More Holistic Approach
What is PR Custom Scoring?
How PR Custom Scoring Works
Why Custom Scoring Matters
Modern PR Reporting in Practice
Conclusion
Discover Meltwater, the brains behind PR Custom Reporting
The Limitations of AVE and the Need for Better PR Metrics
AVE calculates PR value by estimating how much it would have cost to purchase the same amount of space or airtime in advertising. While simple, this approach has significant drawbacks:
- Oversimplifies value: AVE translates editorial coverage into dollar figures without accounting for placement quality, sentiment, or audience engagement.
- Ignores qualitative difference: A negative article might receive a high AVE score despite harming a brand’s reputation — something monetary equivalency alone doesn’t capture.
- Less relevance in digital media: As online and social coverage grows, AVE struggles to represent truly multidimensional PR outcomes.
These limitations have driven industry-wide debate and calls from organisations like AMEC (International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) for better alternative metrics.
The problem with one-size-fits-all PR measurement
We understand that not all press mentions are created equal. A mention of your CEO in the headline of a tier 1 target publication is likely to hold more weight than a mention of your brand alongside your competitors in the body of a tier 2 target publication. Despite this, coverage has typically been ranked and reported in the same manner, that is, unless public relation professionals conducted manual PR measurement.
Traditionally, custom PR reporting required extensive manual work, and as a result, was often more expensive compared to off the shelf ways of measuring public relations. Now, thanks to advances in technology such as predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, we’re on the cusp of a new generation of PR measurement solutions. This is resulting in PR teams moving away from generic, static and legacy metrics like AVE and Barcelona Principles towards public relations measurement models that are as flexible and agile as their businesses. For example, analysing the impact of coverage in a way that digital communication pros define, tailored to their individual KPIs.
Enter PR Custom Scoring: A More Holistic Approach
PR Custom Scoring is a flexible measurement model that lets PR professionals define what success means for their specific campaigns. Instead of relying on one-size-fits-all metrics, Custom Scoring allows teams to:
- Select relevant metrics such as publication authority, reach, sentiment, prominence, tags, and social engagement.
- Assign custom weights to each metric based on strategic objectives.
- Generate total scores, average scores, and individual article scores to reflect the overall impact of earned media.
This approach removes the need to translate coverage into hypothetical ad spend and instead evaluates PR coverage according to what matters most to your brand.
What is PR Custom Scoring?
When it comes to measuring and evaluating PR campaigns, we understood that a blanket approach doesn’t always cut it, that’s why our clients now have the power to effectively apply weight to the metrics important to them in a completely customisable fashion, all within our Media Intelligence platform.
Built from the need to have flexible and dynamic PR measurement, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to find a solution to this problem. And we’ve found it - PR Custom Scoring.
PR Custom Scoring allows PR pros and PR agencies to define their own success metrics to effectively rank PR campaign coverage and better quantify the value of earned media. Using Meltwater, public relations teams can create unique scoring models, including custom weights, and even custom metrics to assign a value to each piece of earned media. For example, you may assign more weight to the prominence of coverage, or maybe its social media reach is more important to you, or maybe it's domain authoritative that's of increased importance.
Through PR Custom Scoring, digital PR teams can now consistently measure the value of their PR campaign media coverage based on their own goals and objectives. This means saying goodbye to static legacy metrics and hello to bespoke reporting that doesn’t blow your budget!
How PR Custom Scoring Works
At its core, Custom Scoring transforms PR measurement from a static number into a tailored evaluation framework:
- Choose key metrics: Select the indicators that align with your campaign goals (e.g., sentiment importance vs. sheer reach).
Because the scoring model is fully customizable, teams can adapt it over time as business needs or campaign priorities shift.
Each piece of editorial content is given a score associated to six key metrics; each metric can be toggled on and off depending on your needs.
- Set weights: Apply weights to each selected metric so that more strategic factors contribute more to the final score.
You then have a custom value applied to each metric, which will contribute to a total score.
- Score content: Meltwater automatically calculates the score for each piece of earned media and aggregates totals for your campaign or time period.
Once all of the values and metrics have been selected, the content of this search will be tallied to provide a total score, along with an average and individual article score.
- Report insights: Use the scoring results to create reports that demonstrate value in a way that aligns with internal objectives.
It’s as simple as that to configure your own custom score within a few steps! What’s more, PR Custom Scoring has the ability to support multiple scoring models, so you can have different measurement metrics for different projects. For example, for one project you may want to customise how negative media affects the overall score or apply my weight to certain social media conversations.
Why Custom Scoring Matters
Unlike AVE, which assigns a monetary equivalency to coverage, Custom Scoring gives PR teams a more meaningful, multidimensional representation of value:
- Reflects quality and relevance of coverage, not just volume.
- Accounts for audience engagement and tone, bridging quantitative and qualitative measurement.
- Supports comparison across periods and campaigns to track progress over time.
- Enables stakeholder reporting that connects PR outcomes to strategic objectives.
This flexibility allows PR teams to move away from outdated legacy metrics and toward dynamic reporting that resonates with both communicators and executive leadership.
Modern PR Reporting in Practice
To make reporting more insightful and impactful, modern PR teams should:
- Define success metrics up front based on campaign goals.
- Leverage automated scoring to reduce manual work and improve accuracy.
- Show trends and insights rather than just totals, helping stakeholders understand why results matter.
- Combine scoring with other metrics (e.g., reach, sentiment, behavioural outcomes) for full context.
Conclusion
PR measurement must evolve beyond simplistic proxies like AVE to truly reflect the value of earned media in today’s complex media environment. PR Custom Scoring offers a flexible, tailored alternative — one that aligns with strategic goals, acknowledges the diversity of media channels, and produces meaningful insights for reporting and decision-making.
By embracing customizable scoring models, PR teams can modernize their reporting, demonstrate real impact, and better justify their contribution to organisational success.
Discover Meltwater, the brains behind PR Custom Reporting
Meltwater continues to invest in delivering a wide breadth of content to more than 30,000 brands worldwide. We're doing this by growing the World’s largest news and social media database. Our industry-leading AI-powered crawlers, and a network of global partnerships with content providers such as Twitter and Reddit, help us capture more content than anyone else. More content means more reliable analytics that help you find the insights you need. We utilize artificial intelligence to discover content from all corners of the internet, pulling our results from over 1.3 trillion documents. What's more, we add over 500 million new documents every day! While this all sounds very tiring, from a client perspective, it's a smooth ride! We do the work for you.
We understand that the modern user expects simple and elegant consumer applications. That’s why our PR solution prioritizes simplicity and efficiency with a sleek new intuitive navigation and design that has streamlined user experience at the core. Fill out the form to learn how you can transform every stage of your PR strategy and workflow with our PR solution today!
Finally, you can quantify the impact of press coverage using metrics that are tailored to your business and aren't held back by legacy metrics like AVE! So if you want to step away from traditional measurement and learn more about how PR Custom Scoring can help you prove ROI of brand awareness and more, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch:
