Every successful PR campaign is judged on the coverage it earns and the difference that coverage makes.
Volume isn’t value. Five mentions in the media outlets your audience actually reads will outperform a hundred scattered anywhere else. Media monitoring is how you find that coverage, separate the meaningful from the incidental, and prove its worth to stakeholders.
Key takeaways
- Reliable media monitoring helps PRs track brand reputation, campaign performance, competitors, and industry news in one place.
- Roxhill Media Monitoring saves time by automatically organising and filtering mentions into themed, prioritised groups, which makes it easier to focus on relevant coverage.
- Using flexible reporting tools makes it easier to measure campaign performance, share insights with stakeholders, and make data-driven decisions.
- Real-time updates help PRs respond quickly to emerging stories and potential risks.
- Monitoring competitors can reveal market trends, opportunities, and changes, enabling PRs to adapt their strategy as needed.
What is media monitoring?
Quick answer
Media monitoring is the practice of systematically tracking mentions of a brand, person, competitor or topic across media channels, including online news, print, broadcast, podcasts and social platforms. PRs use it to capture coverage as it appears, measure how a brand is being talked about, and evidence the impact of their campaigns to prove the value of their efforts.Two things are happening at once.
- Capture – relevant and accurate coverage reaches you without waiting for your stakeholder to forward the link.
- Context – you can see whether your brand, client or spokesperson is mentioned positively, how many people see it, and whether it moves the conversation where you want it to go.
But it was not always this way. Picture yourself working through stacks of newspapers and magazines every morning, cutting out anything relevant and organising it on a clipboard before the client call. That was media monitoring for decades, and plenty of PRs still remember doing it.
Why is media monitoring important for PRs?
Quick answer
The role of media monitoring in PR is to replace assumptions with evidence. Without it, you are working blind: you cannot prove which stories landed and where, catch a developing crisis early, or show a client how their coverage compares with a competitor’s.
But what happens when your monitoring tool misses something relevant? Inaccurate data quietly undermines everything built on top of it. Your reach figures are wrong, your share of voice is wrong, and the report you take into a client meeting is wrong. Three things depend on getting it right:
- Proof of impact – coverage reports built from monitoring data are how PR agencies justify retainers and how in-house teams justify budget.
- Early warning – negative coverage costs far less to manage in the first few hours than it does the next morning. Media monitoring is what buys you those hours.
- Smarter targeting – knowing which journalists already cover your sector tells you who to pitch next and, just as valuably, who to stop pitching to.
This is why PRs worldwide rely on our media monitoring services rather than piecing coverage together from free alerts and forwarded emails.
What should you monitor?
Quick answer
Most PRs monitor four areas: mentions of the brand, competitor coverage, spokespeople, and industry news. Between them, these show how the brand is performing, how it compares, who is representing it, and what is shaping the conversation around it.
| What to monitor | What it tells you | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Brand mentions | Named mentions of the brand, its executives, its products and its campaigns, across editorial, broadcast and social | Becomes the coverage report you hand to stakeholders |
| Competitor activity | How much coverage competitors get, on what themes, and in which outlets | Answers “how do we compare?” before the stakeholders ask |
| Spokespeople | Where your experts are mentioned and how their visibility compares with rival spokespeople | Shows who is actually carrying the brand’s reputation |
| Industry news | Wider sector coverage and the journalists producing it | Surfaces reactive opportunities and who to pitch them to |
Does media monitoring cover social media?
Quick answer
Yes. Social monitoring tracks brand, competitor and spokesperson mentions across social platforms in the same way press monitoring tracks editorial coverage. The value is in seeing both in one place, because a story often breaks on social hours before it reaches a newsroom.
Press and social answer different questions. Editorial coverage tells you what journalists decided was worth writing. Social tells you what people are saying without being asked, which is usually faster and less filtered.
That speed is the point. A complaint that gains traction on a Saturday becomes a news story on Monday, and the hours in between are when it is cheapest to deal with. Monitoring only the press means finding out once it is already a story.
Social monitoring is available in Roxhill Media Monitoring as a feature you can switch on. It is self-service, so you set up your own searches rather than raising a request, and social mentions land in the same Smart Folders as your press coverage rather than in a separate tool you have to check and reconcile by hand. Journalists who mention your brand on social can be added straight to your media lists.
Two things are worth knowing before you set it up. Social volume runs far higher than press volume, so filtering matters more, not less. And a thousand posts from accounts nobody follows is not a result, which means relevant mentions matter more than total mentions.
How does media monitoring help in a crisis?
Quick answer
Monitoring can tell you a problem exists whilst it is still small enough to handle. The value is not the alert itself but the hours it buys you – check the facts, brief a spokesperson and decide on a response before the story becomes bigger.
Most crises do not arrive as a front page. They start as a complaint that gets traction, a journalist making enquiries, or a competitor’s problem that is about to become a sector story. By the time it reaches a Google Alert digest the following morning, the decisions have been made without you.
Setting this up is mostly about deciding in advance what counts as urgent, because everything can’t. In practice that means a small number of specific triggers: your CEO’s name, a product name paired with words like recall or investigation, coverage from the two or three outlets that set your sector’s agenda.
Then decide where the alert goes and who acts on it. An email nobody reads at the weekend is not an early warning system. Roxhill can push coverage into Slack or WhatsApp as it lands, which matters when the difference between a manageable problem and a story is a few hours.
Our UK crisis communications playbook covers what to do once a negative story lands.
Why does relevant coverage matter more than complete coverage?
Quick answer
A long list of mentions is not a result. The value is in knowing which mentions reached the right people and which changed nothing, so the filtering should happen before the coverage reaches you, not after.Deciding what to monitor is the easy part. The hard part is that unorganised media monitoring buries you in results that have nothing to do with the brand you’re tracking, which is why filtering matters as much as capturing.
This is the difference between a monitoring setup that gets used and one that gets ignored. Relevance is built into Roxhill’s Media Monitoring. Its Smart Folders group mentions by theme, so the coverage that matters surfaces on its own rather than arriving as one long list you have to sort yourself.
When you report, the figure that persuades is not how many mentions you captured. It is how many appeared where your audience actually looks, and how they engaged when they got there.
What is media analytics and how is it different from monitoring?
Quick answer
Monitoring is the collection layer; analytics is the interpretation layer. Monitoring gathers relevant mentions as they appear. Analytics measures sentiment, reach, share of voice and recurring themes to establish what that coverage achieved. Most media monitoring platforms do both, so the distinction is between two jobs, not two products.
Mentions
Top 5 community keyword trends
Media monitoring vs media analytics
| Aspect | Media monitoring | Media analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | What gets published? | Does it work? |
| Output | A list of relevant mentions | Sentiment, reach, share of voice and themes |
| Timing | Continuous, as coverage appears | Periodic, across a set of coverage |
| Used for | Alerts, coverage reports, reactive spotting | Campaign evaluation, benchmarking, strategy |
| Fails when | Nobody reviews it | It measures the wrong thing |
How monitoring and analytics work together
Monitoring collects; analytics interprets. One hands you the coverage, the other tells you what it added up to.
Analytics can only work with what monitoring picked up. If your setup is pulling in the wrong coverage, the report still comes out looking normal – same tidy percentages, same confident chart. Nothing flags it.
So it’s worth getting the tracking right at the start. Check the setup properly when you build it, and again whenever the brief changes – every report you produce comes out of it.
What is sentiment analysis and how reliable is it?
Quick answer
Sentiment analysis answers the question behind every coverage report: was it good, bad or neutral? Automated scoring is right often enough to be useful at scale, and wrong often enough that individual labels need a human eye. Trust the pattern, verify the specifics.
Sentiment analysis scores each piece of coverage as positive, negative or neutral, and it works better across a period of time than on any single article. An obvious shift from positive to negative is worth acting on. The score on one article often is not, because a tool scores the language rather than the meaning behind it – so sarcasm reads as praise, criticism your spokesperson was quoting reads as their own, and an article hostile about your industry reads as hostile about you.
The other half of the problem is that negative is not a fixed category. What counts as negative for a challenger brand chasing attention is not what counts as negative for a regulated financial institution, where a single word carries compliance weight.
Which is why the rules should be yours to set. Sentiment rules can be set per client, and individual mentions are still worth reviewing before they reach a report.
Can a brand mention be positive in a negative article?
Quick answer
Yes. The tone of an article and the tone of your mention inside it are not the same thing, so a piece of coverage can be very negative and still record a positive mention for your brand.
An article can be harsh about an industry, a policy or a competitor and still quote your brand positively. Scored at article level, that lands in your report as negative coverage. Scored at mention level, it is a positive appearance in a story people are actually reading. It works in reverse too: an upbeat feature can mention your brand only as the company that got left behind, and article-level scoring records it as a positive.
This is a reporting problem. Article-level scoring hides the good mentions inside bad coverage, and those are the months a client reads the report least carefully.
So if you are comparing tools, ask whether sentiment is scored per article, per mention, or both. Roxhill Media Monitoring scores at both, and its Intelli-Labels read each mention in context, so a positive quote inside a critical piece is recorded as exactly that.
What is share of voice and how do you use it?
Quick answer
Share of voice tells you how much of the conversation in your market belongs to your brand and how much belongs to everyone else. It is measured as a percentage of total coverage on a defined topic, across the same period, against a named set of competitors.Share of voice is one of the most useful figures in a PR report because it carries its own benchmark. A mention count only reads as good or bad next to what everyone else got. Share of voice answers that comparison before anyone asks it.
It depends entirely on who you compare yourself with, though. Change the competitor set and the number changes, so agree on the list before the campaign rather than after the results are in.
Pair it with audience reach and you get two separate things: how much of the conversation you own, and how many people are on the other side of it. A brand can dominate a trade title read by two thousand people and still be absent from the places that shape its reputation.
The same comparison works on people. Ranking your spokespeople against rival experts often gives a different picture from the brand-level numbers.
How should you report on media monitoring?
Build your reporting around the metrics the campaign is set up to move, not the metrics the tool happens to give you. Before launch, agree on them with the people you report to. Standard metrics like volume and reach come with every tool. Custom metrics are the ones you define yourself, so a campaign about credibility gets measured on credibility rather than on how many mentions it produced.
A useful report leads with the answer: what happened, whether it worked, what you would do differently. The coverage list is an appendix, not the report. Most people invert this and open with volume because it is the easiest thing to show.
After that, three things matter:
- Consistency – keep the format the same between periods, or results can’t be compared.
- Exportable data – you need the underlying numbers, not just the summary, the first time someone questions a figure.
- Clarity – a stakeholder outside the PR team should be able to read it without you talking them through it.
A dashboard built on those metrics is what makes all three easy to hold to. The format stays the same each period without anyone rebuilding it, and the chart types can suit what each metric is actually showing, which is what Roxhill Media Monitoring is built to do. It also tells you where to push harder next time, which is the part most reports skip.
Is advertising value equivalent (AVE) still used in PR?
Quick answer
Yes, but less and less. AVE prices your coverage as if you had bought it as advertising, but earned coverage and paid ads are not the same, which is why the Barcelona Principles reject it outright./div>
The objection is straightforward.
AVE measures column inches, so it ignores everything that made the coverage worth having: sentiment, message, audience relevance and credibility.
It also flatters big-ticket placements that reached nobody you were trying to reach. AMEC’s Barcelona Principles have rejected it since 2010, and that has not softened with time. The 2025 update tells PRs to drop invalid measures like AVE and evaluate coverage by its outcome and impact instead.
Some stakeholders still ask for it, usually because a finance director wants a single currency figure. The practical response is not to refuse outright, but to offer better measures alongside it:
- Share of voice against a named competitor set
- Audience reach within the segments that actually matter
- Message pull-through – how much of what you briefed appeared in the coverage
- Referral traffic where the link was followed
All of these answer the question AVE was trying to answer: was the activity worth what you spent on it?
How do you track a press release from send to coverage?
Quick answer
Press release tracking automatically links a release to the coverage it generated. It scans incoming coverage for matching phrases, paraphrasing, spokespeople and brand references, then shows you where the release was picked up, who covered it and how the tone read.
You write it. You send it. Then you wait, wondering who opened it, which publications ran with it and if the story landed. Every PR professional knows that wait. It gets uncomfortable when a client asks how it went before you know yourself.
Roxhill’s Press Release Tracker closes that gap. It tracks runs automatically, tying every piece of coverage back to the release that produced it. What you see:
- Engagement – who opened your release, and when
- Coverage pickup – every article matched to the press release automatically
- Sentiment – the tone of each piece, without reading them all
- Follow-up flags – who is worth a thank you, and who is worth a next step
It answers the hardest part of the job, which is proving your work paid off, and it gives you back the morning you would have spent tagging articles by hand – so you can work smarter, not harder.
Can you do media monitoring without a tool?
Quick answer
Yes, for a narrow brief. Manual monitoring using search alerts, RSS feeds and direct checks of a fixed list of publications works when you are tracking one brand across a handful of known outlets. It becomes impractical once you are covering several brands, multiple channels or a fast-moving story.Doing it by hand has its upsides. It costs nothing, and you read the coverage yourself. If you have one brand and a short list of outlets, it may be all you need.
But you hit the wall on scale and speed: when coverage starts slipping past you, and you cannot show what you found or how it compares with your competitors. That is usually when a media monitoring service pays for itself.
Manual monitoring vs monitoring tool
| Aspect | Manual monitoring | A monitoring tool |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Subscription |
| Channels | Online news, patchy social | Online, print, broadcast, podcast and social, depending on licence |
| Speed | Delayed and batched | Real time |
| Paywalled and syndicated | Unreliable | Covered |
| Relevance | You filter every result by hand | Mentions grouped and prioritised automatically |
| Reporting | Manual collation, hard to show what mattered | Filtered, exportable and auditable |
| Practical limit | One brand, a few known outlets | Multiple clients and campaigns |
See how the options stack up in our guide to the top 10 media monitoring tools.
How much does media monitoring cost?
Quick answer
Media monitoring is sold on subscription, but vendors price it differently. Some charge by channel, some by how much coverage you collect, and others by how many people need access. Roxhill’s bands are built around team size and setup. Ask any vendor which model they use, and what sits outside the headline fee; that is usually where quotes stop being comparable.
Almost no vendor publishes figures, which can be frustrating when you are trying to budget. Rates vary by the size of the brief, so a number quoted to a twelve-client agency tells a solo in-house PR very little.
What you can do is work out what you are actually buying before you get on a call. The questions worth asking are:
- What is included in the headline fee, and what is charged on top
- How many brands, topics or themes the licence covers
- How far back you can search
- Whether journalist data and contact details are bundled or separate
- How many seats are included
- Whether the contract is annual or rolling
The answers matter more than the headline figure, because that is where vendors differ the most. Roxhill publishes its bands, and what sits in each one, so you can see the shape of it before you talk to anyone. See how our pricing works.
Just remember that cheapest is not always right. You don’t feel the cost of missed relevant coverage until someone sends you a piece you should have found. And a tool nobody logs into is money spent for nothing.
How do you use media monitoring in your PR strategy?
Quick answer
Media monitoring can support your PR strategy in two directions. Before you pitch, it identifies trends, journalists and reactive opportunities. After the campaign, it measures which activity produced results, so your next campaign is shaped by what actually worked.Supporting proactive and reactive PR
Monitoring works in both directions:
- Proactively – it shows you which journalists are covering your sector right now and which angles are landing.
- Reactively – it surfaces developing stories you can contribute to, where being three hours early is the whole difference between a quote and no quote.
None of that helps if the alert sits in an inbox nobody checks. Roxhill can push coverage into Slack or WhatsApp as it lands rather than holding it for the morning digest.
Measuring campaign success with the right metrics
Standard metrics are a starting point, not an answer. If a campaign is designed to reach a specific trade audience, measure it against coverage in that trade press, not against total mention volume. With Roxhill Media Monitoring, you can set custom metrics that map to what the campaign is actually for, then report against them consistently so you can compare one period with the next.
Benchmarking against competitors
Competitor monitoring answers questions your own coverage never will:
- Which themes are your competitors owning?
- Which outlets cover them but never you?
- Is your share of voice moving over a period long enough to mean something?
Tracked across quarters rather than weeks, this is some of the most persuasive data you can put in front of a client.
Then let what you find change what you do next. At the end of a campaign, look back at which journalists responded and which ignored you, which themes travelled beyond the first outlet, and which titles you keep pitching without ever landing. Monitoring that never changes your next pitch is just record-keeping, and you have better things to do with the time.
Frequently asked questions
How does real-time media monitoring differ from scheduled reports, and when is each useful?
Real-time media monitoring provides immediate alerts to emerging stories or issues, while scheduled reports offer periodic summaries for deeper analysis. Real-time monitoring is ideal for crisis management, and scheduled reports suit long-term strategy tracking.
What type of reports can media monitoring software generate, and who are they useful for?
Media monitoring software can generate sentiment analysis reports, share of voice reports, media coverage summaries, press release performance reports and competitor analysis. These are valuable to PRs, comms teams, marketing teams and executives for strategic decision making. If a report is not available as standard, tools like Roxhill Media Monitoring can build custom reporting.
How can media monitoring help in measuring the ROI of PR campaigns?
Media monitoring shows what your activity actually returned, tracking coverage volume, audience reach and sentiment to give a picture of the effect on brand visibility and reputation. Press release tracking adds a direct link between what you send and what gets published.
What are the benefits of monitoring competitor mentions in the media?
Monitoring competitor mentions gives you a competitive edge. It helps you stay ahead of market trends, identify the strategies competitors are using, and apply those insights to improve your own brand positioning.
How can media monitoring contribute to building stronger relationships with journalists?
Media monitoring keeps you informed about what individual journalists are writing about right now, whether that is your brand or a competitor’s, so you can engage on relevant stories at the right moment and build better-informed, more welcome relationships.
What are Intelli-Labels in media monitoring?
Intelli-Labels are Roxhill’s AI-driven labels that add context to every media mention. They read tone, track your key messages, and surface the strategic themes and reputation drivers that matter to your brand, automatically across all your coverage.
Can I get media coverage alerts in Slack or WhatsApp?
Yes. Roxhill offers both Slack and WhatsApp integrations, delivering real-time coverage alerts where your team already works. WhatsApp sends notifications straight to your phone the moment a piece lands, while Slack posts coverage into your team channel with alerts set by client, keyword or publication.
What is the importance of visualising data in media monitoring reports?
Visualising data in media monitoring reports presents complex information clearly, which makes it easier to identify trends, measure success and communicate insights to stakeholders who are not close to the detail.
How does media monitoring influence decisions around campaign adjustments?
Media monitoring gives you real-time insight into public sentiment and coverage, so you can spot issues or opportunities quickly and adjust a live campaign for maximum impact.
MEDIA INTELLIGENCE YOU CAN TRUST
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Roxhill’s all-in-one media intelligence platform will save you time, highlight your impact, and drive your business forward.
MEDIA INTELLIGENCE YOU CAN TRUST
We’re with you, every step of the way
One login. Multiple solutions.
Roxhill’s all-in-one media intelligence platform will save you time, highlight your impact, and drive your business forward.
Click a product to explore its features.