Digital PR glossary

Coverage tracking

Coverage tracking is the process of finding, recording and evaluating the media coverage a PR campaign earns, including the outlet, date, link status, syndicated copies and outcomes such as referral traffic. It turns a list of articles into evidence of what a campaign achieved, and it is how digital PR results are reported.

Reviewed by Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director
Last reviewed 31 October 2026

What should a coverage tracker record?

Google has treated nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints for ranking since 10 September 2019, and nofollow as a hint for crawling and indexing since 1 March 2020. Record the attribute on every link rather than discarding nofollowed coverage.

Outlet, URL, publication date and author
Whether the piece links, which page it links to and the link attribute
Whether the page is indexed
Whether it is an original article or a syndicated copy
Brand and spokesperson mentions, with or without a link

How do you find coverage?

No single source finds everything. Media monitoring tools and Google Alerts catch mentions, and backlink tools catch links. Google Search Console's Links report shows top linking sites and pages, but Google says it is a sample rather than a full list and limits on-screen tables to 1,000 rows, so it works best as a cross-check.

Which metrics matter?

The Barcelona Principles 3.0, published by AMEC in July 2020, say that advertising value equivalents are not the value of communication and that measurement should identify outputs, outcomes and potential impact. For digital PR, that means links from relevant new domains, referral traffic, branded search, rankings for the pages that were linked and mentions in AI answers, not the combined readership of every syndicated copy.

Example

A campaign appears in 40 articles. The tracker shows that 28 are syndicated copies of 12 original stories, 19 pieces link, 15 of those links are followed and come from 11 domains, and three national pieces name the brand without a link. Those three become link reclamation targets, and the report is more accurate than '40 pieces of coverage'.