Press Clippings

What are Press Clippings?

Press Clippings are a measure of how many times your brand name has been mentioned in press such as newspapers, magazines, television or online media.

How to calculate Press Clippings:

Press Clippings are generally calculated as the volume of press mentions of your brand over a given period of time e.g. month or quarter.

For online press mentions you can use a tool such as Google Alerts or Mention.com to track them. However, for offline press mentions in hard copy newspapers or magazines you’ll need to use a press clippings service. This can be a little more expensive.

Pros:

Press Clippings is a useful leading indicator of brand awareness improvement through Public Relations (PR) efforts. The more your brand is mentioned in popular media, the higher awareness will be, often measured by Brand Recall.

Cons:

Not all press mentions are created equal. Some media outlets can have a readership that doesn’t fit your target market. Consequently, only counting press clippings from a predefined list of publications can ensure mentions are relevant. Also, mentions may be in publications with a small readership, which will have less impact than a mention in a widely read publication. Often tiering publications based on readership size can factor in the value of press clippings.

Tracking online mentions can also be hard if your brand name is a popular term. For example, if you provided an automated reading tool called “Reader”, tracking mentions of the term “Reader” would return lots of mentions that were completely unrelated to your brand. However, if you added an additional keyword filter to you monitoring such as “automated reading” you will be able to narrow mentions more specifically to your brand.