At eReleases, we issue your press release by emailing it to subscribing journalists, moving it over the Associated Press (AP) Newswire, and distributing it over
Cision PR Newswire, which transmits your press release through newswire terminals in newsrooms across the country, as well as places it onto participating partners’ media websites.
For that reason, it’s near impossible to measure the impressions of your press release. There are web-only press release sites, like PRWeb, that do provide you with impressions, because for the most part, your press release resides on only one website. What happens is that they have other sites and partner sites that stream the headline and link back to the actual press release. Your press release is never moving out there to other people; it’s being made available on one page on one website, and that makes it very easy to measure impressions … but not so great for getting media coverage.
Because eReleases is actually sending the press release out to individuals and pushing it to lots of journalists, we just can’t measure impressions. It’s not just the emails that go to subscribing journalists, it’s the newswire distribution. The newswire environment just doesn’t have the capability of measuring impressions on other websites, or email open rates.
In the WireWatch report, you will be provided with various view counts, which represent the views of your press release as hosted on the PR Newswire site. Please note, however, that these statistics do not include the views that occur on the hundreds of other sites on which your release is published.
If another service touts that you can see how many people have viewed your news story, or how many people have opened it, this is a big indicator that your press release is NOT going over a true newswire service, because there’s no way to measure that in a newswire environment. It is also a sign that your press release is NOT being placed in front of journalists but instead resides on a single webpage on a single website, which is not a distribution but rather an expensive webpage. In either case, you’re likely dealing with a company that has simply co-opted the term “newswire.”