Data Analysis of Three PR Agencies Scoring Impressive Media Coverage

In case you didn’t get a chance to tune in to our blog last week, here’s a recap before we dive into our part-two research insights below… We pulled data from our public relations management (PRM) software that allowed us to analyze the performance of over 700,000 media pitches, from the moment they were sent to the ultimate response rates they received from journalists. We found that journalists respond to roughly 3.27% of the pitches they receive. This means that, on average, it takes about 31 media pitches to any range of journalist contacts to get a response to any one of the pitches you send to them.

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Taking our previous analysis one step further, we looked into the article-published rate based on the total number of media pitches that a select three of our clients sent through our PRM software….

Why only three? Well, we want to deliver the most accurate data possible. Stating when an article has been published is a manual and optional, rather than an automated feature of Propel PRM. Because this feature is not automated, some clients naturally decide to use it more than others, and that’s okay.

For research’s sake, we scanned our PRM database to find three clients that use this feature the most and pulled data based on an average of their article-published rates.

It turns out that only about 8% of media pitches sent to journalists resulted in a published article. Sheesh. 

While I’m sure we can all agree that this is a tough figure to face, it is indeed the reality of media pitching. Not every pitch will lead to a published article, and a select few pitches will always perform better than others. 

You may also notice that these response rates and publishing rates appear to be significantly higher than the averages we obtained last week from our client base at large. This is important to be wary of, but it also makes sense for a few insightful reasons…

These three organisations have their teams make exceptional use of all things Propel, including manually operating features like the article-published field in their pitching data. This reflects that firms like these have great attention-to-detail and heavily prioritise having a well-organised media strategy. One may infer from these sorts of operations that the best practices don’t stop here. Therefore, these firms tend to achieve some of the higher article-published rates of the lot.

See a breakdown of the client sample’s pitching process below, from initial pitch to article published:

This data cannot necessarily be generalised across all clients due to the small sample size, but it does provide a more accurate representation of what a select few clients’ pitching stats actually look like. We made sure to pull stats on PR firms of three different sizes so that we could still arrive at a well-rounded, mini story funnel example.

We hope you enjoyed a deeper look into these firms’ article-published stats and that they can help you build up your own tactics… Happy pitching!