PR Report Template (What to Include)

A PR report is a periodic summary that shows a client or executive what a PR program achieved against its goals — the coverage it earned, how good that coverage was, and the business it helped move. A strong one leads with results, not activity: top placements and why they mattered, whether the message landed, share of voice, and any impact you can honestly attribute. Below is a copy-paste template you can lift and fill in.

The PR report template

Seven sections, in this order. Each has one line on what goes in it.

1. Executive summary The results against the goals you set, in three or four sentences a busy executive reads first. State the goal, what happened this period, and whether you're on track — this is the heart of measuring campaign success, so put it at the top, not the end.

2. Coverage highlights Your top three to five placements, each as a live link, with one line on why it mattered: the outlet, the audience it reached, and the message it carried. This is the section most people actually read.

3. Coverage volume and quality The full list of placements in a table, so quality is visible at a glance instead of hidden behind a total. One row per placement:

Outlet	Date	Reach / tier	On-message?	Link
TechCrunch	Aug 12	Tier 1	Yes	Live link
Industry trade title	Aug 19	Tier 2 · trade	Partial	Live link
Regional business journal	Aug 24	Regional	Yes	Live link

4. Message and theme pull-through Which of your key messages the coverage actually carried — not just that the brand was named. Note the themes that landed, the ones that didn't, and what that tells you for next period.

5. Share of voice vs. competitors Your brand's proportion of coverage in the category against named competitors, as a directional trend over the period. Read it alongside quality, not on its own.

6. Business outcomes (where attributable) The outcomes you can honestly tie to coverage — referral traffic, branded search lift, and leads or pipeline around placements. Be explicit about the attribution gap: PR rarely offers a clean single number, so show direction and name your assumptions rather than inventing false precision.

7. What's next The plan for the coming period — stories in flight, the opportunities you're chasing, and what you'd do more or less of based on what worked.

How to fill it in

Work top-down. Fill the executive summary last, once the sections beneath it are done, so it summarizes real content instead of promising it. Pull sections 2 and 3 straight from the coverage you've tracked — if you logged each placement as it published, this is a lookup, not a rebuild. For sections 4 through 6, resist the urge to pad: a few outcome metrics moving in the right direction, tied to your coverage, are more persuasive than a wall of impressions. These are the metrics that matter, and a report built on them survives scrutiny.

You'll notice one thing this template leaves out: Advertising Value Equivalency. Pricing earned coverage as if it were an ad measures nothing real, so there's no AVE line here — report honest outcomes instead. One thing worth adding as it matures: an AI-visibility line, since earned coverage now feeds the answers customers get from AI assistants and "does the AI mention us?" increasingly belongs in the report.

A report is only painful to write when the underlying record is scattered. When every placement, message, opportunity, and outcome is already captured as the work happens, the report largely writes itself — and keeping that operational record complete in the background is part of what an AI PR agent like UnpromptedPR does.

---

Related: PR Metrics That Matter · How to Measure PR Campaign Success · How to Track Media Coverage · How Earned Media Impacts AI Visibility