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Media Coverage

Media coverage is the reporting of a brand, product or event by media outlets such as news sites, magazines and broadcasters. When the publisher is not paid for it, it is earned media, as opposed to advertising.

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By , Founder & CEOUpdated 6 min read

What is Media Coverage?

Media coverage is reporting: an article, a broadcast segment or a podcast mention that names a brand, a product or an event. Dictionaries list a second, unrelated sense, used in media planning, for the number or percentage of people a communications medium reaches. This entry uses the reporting sense.

When the publisher is not paid, coverage is earned media: content about a person or organization published by a third party without payment. It excludes advertising and advertorials (paid media) and the brand's own channels (owned media). The brand does not control the message once a journalist has it, so it may not say what the brand wanted and may be negative. And earned media is not entirely cost-free.

It is often claimed that coverage is more credible than advertising, and the evidence is mixed. A 2019 summary on the Institute for Public Relations site says past experimental research consistently found that people do not consider earned media more credible than advertising, then reports a newer qualitative study in which the largest share of participants found an earned news story the most credible source shown.

Counting what was published is easy; showing what it did is harder, because the value earned media contributes is harder to determine than advertising metrics are. AMEC, the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, asks in its Barcelona Principles 3.0 for measurable goals and for outcomes and potential impact, not only outputs. It also states that AVEs, advertising value equivalents that claim to put a financial value on PR work, are not the value of communication.

GA4's default channel group has no channel for coverage. A reader who clicks a link in a news article lands in Referral, one who enters your URL or uses a saved link lands in Direct, and one who clicks a non-ad search result for your name lands in Organic Search. None of those visits is labeled as coverage.

For illustration, suppose a store averages 200 orders a week, an outlet publishes a feature, and orders in the following week are 260, so orders rose by 60. If a sale also started that Monday, the 60 cannot be split between the sale and the article, and the same holds for an email send, a price change or a shift in ad spend that week.

Why Media Coverage matters for ecommerce

Coverage competes for budget even when no one is paid for the placement, because earned media is not entirely cost-free. The trouble is that a feature shows up in the data as extra visits and orders spread across channels, and GA4 files each visit by how the reader arrived, not why. That makes it easy to credit the rise to Direct, Organic Search or a paid channel that happened to be running, and just as easy to credit the article with a rise that a sale or an email caused. Writing the goal down before the pitch and logging the publication time are what let a later comparison say anything.

How to use Media Coverage

  1. Before you pitch, write the goal as something you can see in your data, such as sessions from the outlet's site or searches for your brand name, as the Barcelona Principles ask. When coverage appears, log the outlet, URL, publication time and whether it links to your store.
  2. In GA4, open the Traffic acquisition report by session source / medium and look for the outlet's site among the Referral sources from the publication date. Readers who enter your URL or search your name will not show it.
  3. In Search Console's Performance report, use the Queries dimension, filter for queries containing your brand name, and compare the days after publication with the same weekdays earlier. Anonymized queries are omitted, so counts are partial.
  4. In Shopify, compare orders after publication with the same weekdays before, and list everything else that changed in the window: sends, promotions, price, ad spend, stock.
  5. Check the result. Pass: the outlet's referral sessions and brand searches rise on the publication date, nothing else changed, and orders rise with them; the rise is consistent with an effect of the coverage. Fail: other changes overlap or neither signal moves; this comparison cannot then separate the effect, and the honest report says so.

Common mistakes

  1. Pricing coverage as an advertising equivalent. AMEC says cost and value often bear no relation to each other and that AVEs give no insight into content quality, so all coverage is counted equally whatever its caliber.
  2. Reporting outputs as results. A count of mentions is an output; the Barcelona Principles ask for outputs, outcomes and potential impact to be identified.
  3. Crediting a rise to the article when something else changed that week. A before-and-after comparison isolates an event only if it is the only thing that changed and the earlier pattern would have continued.
  4. Reading Referral as the whole effect. Readers who later enter your URL or search your name arrive through Direct or search channels, so the outlet's referral count captures only those who clicked through.
  5. Assuming coverage helps because it is editorial. The brand does not control the message, it can be negative, and whether earned media is more credible than advertising is contested.

Frequently asked questions

  • Is media coverage the same as earned media?
    Coverage the publisher was not paid for is earned media: content about a person or organization published by a third party without payment. Coverage that was paid for, such as an advertorial, is paid media even though it reads like an article.
  • How do you measure the effect of media coverage on sales?
    Only roughly. Log the publication time, then compare orders, the outlet's referral sessions and brand-name searches with the same weekdays before. A before-and-after comparison isolates the coverage only if nothing else changed at the same time and the earlier pattern would have continued.
  • Why is advertising value equivalency criticized?
    AMEC's Barcelona Principles state that AVEs are not the value of communication. Its guide adds that AVEs confuse cost with value, which often bear no relation to each other, and give no insight into the quality of the content.
  • Does media coverage appear as its own channel in GA4?
    No. GA4's default channel group sorts visits by how people arrived: Referral for non-ad links on other sites such as news sites, Direct for entered URLs and saved links, Organic Search for non-ad search results. A visit prompted by coverage lands in one of those.

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