What digital PR actually costs and how long it takes

Digital PR is cheaper and slower than people expect at the same time. Practitioner benchmarks put first coverage within a week for 81% of campaigns, measurable results within six months for 85%, most monthly budgets under $10,000, and 80% of practitioners never buying links at all.

Those four numbers together tell you something useful: the first placement is easy, the compounding is not, and the tactic everyone worries about is one most working practitioners do not use.

Where the money actually goes

For a campaign running around $10,000 a month, the split usually lands close to this.

The largest single line is the thing that generates the story. A survey through a research panel, a freedom of information request, analysis of your own operational data, or the time of someone senior enough to have a defensible opinion. This is where campaigns are won and where most budgets underspend.

After that: writing, media list building and verification, outreach and follow-up, and asset production. Photography, a chart set, a landing page for the data.

The outreach itself is the cheapest part and the part where fees concentrate. Be suspicious of a proposal where research is a line item worth a tenth of outreach.

The timeline, honestly

First coverage within a week is real and it is also the least meaningful milestone in the programme. A competent operator with a live media list can place something quickly, especially in trade press.

What takes six months is the pattern. Enough coverage across enough outlets that your name starts appearing when someone checks you, that journalists on your round recognise the sender, and that your key facts have been repeated often enough to be picked up as background rather than pitched.

Anyone promising a national masthead in month one is either lucky or making it up. Anyone telling you nothing will happen for six months has not built a trade list.

The link-buying trap

80% never buy links, and that number is worth taking seriously as an industry norm rather than a moral claim.

Paid links breach Google's link spam policy. The exposure is on your domain, not the seller's. And the practical case against them is simpler: the sites that sell links are the sites nobody reads, which means the link carries no referral traffic, no brand effect, and no chance of being retrieved when someone asks an AI assistant a question about your category.

Editorial links come with all three.

Measuring it without lying to yourself

PR does not produce a clean attribution trail, and pretending otherwise is how PR budgets get cut.

Understand what your reporting can and cannot see. Google Ads and GA4 now offer exactly two attribution models: last click and data driven. First click, linear, time decay and position based were removed. Data-driven attribution in GA4 needs at least 400 conversions for the specific action and 20,000 conversions across all actions inside the lookback window, which most mid-sized Australian businesses do not hit.

So your attribution report will show PR as almost nothing. That is a limitation of the instrument, not a finding.

Measure it with four things instead.

Branded search volume, tracked monthly in Search Console. The cleanest available proxy for whether more people know your name.

Referring domains from editorial sources, counted separately from every other link type.

Direct traffic, segmented by landing page. A spike in direct visits to a deep page after a placement is a real signal.

Citation presence in AI answers. Run your ten most commercially important questions through the major assistants once a month and record whether you appear and what they say about you. Ten minutes, and it is the closest thing to a leading indicator this channel has.

If you can afford it, the honest method is a geographic holdout. Run the campaign in two states and not a third, and compare enquiry volume. It is the only approach that survives a CFO who asks how you know.

What to expect for the money

At around $10,000 a month, a well-run programme in a defined sector should produce steady trade coverage, occasional regional and local coverage where you have a physical presence, and one or two genuinely national placements a year off the back of a data campaign.

That is a reasonable return. It is not a lead engine, and any agency selling it as one is setting up a conversation you will both regret in month four.

Fund the story, not the sending.