CPRS Research and Analytics 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A PR team uses UTM parameters on links shared in a press release. What does this allow them to track?
- The number of journalists who opened the press release email
- Which specific traffic sources and campaigns drive website visits from earned media (Correct answer)
- The readability score of the press release content
- The number of social media followers gained after release distribution
Correct answer: Which specific traffic sources and campaigns drive website visits from earned media
UTM parameters tag URLs with source, medium, and campaign data so Google Analytics can attribute website sessions to the specific press release or distribution channel that drove them.
Question 2: Which type of research is conducted BEFORE a PR campaign to inform strategy, messaging, and audience understanding?
- Evaluative research
- Summative research
- Formative research (Correct answer)
- Confirmatory research
Correct answer: Formative research
Formative research is conducted at the planning stage to understand the audience, context, and environment, informing the development of PR strategies and messages before execution begins.
Question 3: An organization wants to understand how different demographic segments perceive their brand differently. Which analytical technique would best reveal these differences?
- Calculating the overall survey mean
- Cross-tabulation (crosstab) analysis by demographic segment (Correct answer)
- Tracking website session duration over time
- Counting total press clips by publication type
Correct answer: Cross-tabulation (crosstab) analysis by demographic segment
Cross-tabulation breaks down survey results by demographic variables (age, gender, region), revealing how perceptions differ across subgroups rather than only showing aggregate averages.
Question 4: A PR practitioner reports that a campaign 'changed public opinion' based solely on a post-campaign survey showing favorable attitudes. What is the primary methodological weakness of this claim?
- Post-campaign surveys are not an accepted primary research method
- Without a pre-campaign baseline, there is no way to know whether attitudes changed or were already favorable (Correct answer)
- Survey data is not valid for measuring public opinion on PR campaigns
- The sample size of a single survey is never large enough to measure opinion change
Correct answer: Without a pre-campaign baseline, there is no way to know whether attitudes changed or were already favorable
A post-only design cannot demonstrate change because there is no baseline comparison — pre- and post-campaign measurement is required to attribute any shift in attitudes to the campaign.
Question 5: Which of the following is a key limitation of using earned media impressions as the primary measure of PR campaign success?
- Impressions are too expensive to measure accurately at scale
- Impressions measure potential exposure but do not confirm that audiences actually saw, understood, or were influenced by the content (Correct answer)
- Impressions cannot be tracked for online media placements
- Impressions are only valid for broadcast media, not print or digital
Correct answer: Impressions measure potential exposure but do not confirm that audiences actually saw, understood, or were influenced by the content
Impressions are an estimate of potential reach, not confirmed exposure or engagement, making them a weak proxy for actual communication impact or behavior change.
Question 6: When comparing two PR agencies' media monitoring reports for the same brand, the numbers differ significantly. The most likely explanation is:
- One agency committed fraud by inflating metrics
- Differences in source coverage, counting methodology, and deduplication rules between monitoring tools (Correct answer)
- One agency used primary research while the other used secondary research
- Different time zones caused data collection gaps in one report
Correct answer: Differences in source coverage, counting methodology, and deduplication rules between monitoring tools
Media monitoring platforms vary in which sources they index, how they count syndicated articles, and whether they deduplicate identical stories, leading to legitimately different totals for the same period.
Question 7: In PR measurement, 'outtakes' refer to:
- The total advertising space equivalent of press coverage obtained
- What audiences took away from a PR message, such as awareness, recall, or attitude shifts (Correct answer)
- The number of story pitches rejected by journalists during a campaign
- The financial costs incurred during campaign execution
Correct answer: What audiences took away from a PR message, such as awareness, recall, or attitude shifts
Outtakes measure intermediate audience responses — whether they received, paid attention to, and retained the message — bridging outputs (PR activities) and outcomes (behavior change).
CPRS Research and Analytics 5
A PR team uses UTM parameters on links shared in a press release.
What does this allow them to track?