Campaign Evaluation Report
Did your campaign actually move the needle, or did it just run while the news happened anyway? The Campaign Evaluation Report measures the lift your campaign drove against a credible baseline, then tells you whether your intended messages landed, where, and with what sentiment.
What it does
Most campaign wrap-ups count coverage during the campaign window and call it success. The problem is that some of that coverage would have happened regardless. This report establishes the counterfactual: it compares your campaign window against a matched baseline period, usually the same number of days immediately before, so the volume, reach, sentiment and ad value you see are genuine lift, not background noise. It then goes a step further and checks each of your messaging pillars against what reporters actually wrote, so you learn not just whether you got coverage, but whether you got the right coverage.
The questions it answers
- How much additional coverage, reach and engagement did the campaign drive above the baseline, and was the lift sustained or a single spike?
- Did our intended messages land, and which pillars broke through versus which were ignored?
- Was the lift high quality, landing in Tier 1 outlets, or did it inflate the headline number with long-tail pickup?
- Did any of our themes get reframed or distorted, and was there counter-messaging we should know about?
- Which spokespeople and which channels actually carried the campaign?
What's in the report
The report opens with a Lift Summary scoreboard comparing the campaign window to the baseline across volume, audience, sentiment, intensity, engagement and ad value, with the standout movements flagged. From there it builds out the picture:
- A Lift Quality breakdown by source tier, channel and geography, because lift in Tier 1 is worth more than lift in the long tail.
- A Message Hit Rate section that scores each pillar as landed strongly, partially landed, or did not land, with the sources and journalists who picked it up.
- Message Distortion and Counter-Narrative sections that surface coverage which bent your framing or pushed back against it.
- A daily Decay Shape chart classifying the campaign as sustained, burst, building or mixed.
- Signature stories, spokesperson contribution, channel contribution and a plain-spoken Campaign Verdict.
Every finding is cited back to the source coverage it came from, so anything in the report can be traced to the article behind it.
Who it's for
This is for communications and marketing leaders who need to show a campaign worked, and prove it with evidence rather than vibes. It suits PR teams running a defined push, brand managers reporting to executives, and agencies presenting results to a client who will reasonably ask whether the coverage was incremental. It is the retrospective a comms director can quote to the board.
Why Truescope Analyst
The honest way to evaluate a campaign by hand is to pull a coverage export, eyeball the dates, guess at a baseline, read for your messages, and hope nobody asks how you defined lift. It takes days, and the baseline is usually an afterthought. A general AI chatbot cannot help here at all, because it has no access to your coverage and can only reason about the single article you paste in. Truescope Analyst reasons across your full media dataset, builds the matched baseline for you, scores every pillar against real pickup, and returns the whole evaluation in minutes rather than days. Because it is built into your Truescope subscription, anyone on the team can run it, and because every claim is cited, the result holds up when it reaches the people who funded the campaign.
Frequently asked questions
What time period can the report cover?
The report draws on up to the last 13 months of coverage in your Truescope inbox, or the last 90 days for global data not already matched to your workspace. That comfortably covers a campaign window and its matched baseline for almost any push.
Do I have to provide the messaging pillars?
Yes. The report needs three to five specific messages the campaign was designed to land, otherwise it can only measure volume lift, not message effectiveness. Concrete, distinctive messages are detected far more reliably than abstract themes.
Can I benchmark against last year instead of the days before the campaign?
Yes. The default baseline is the matching period immediately before your campaign window, but you can specify an alternative, such as the prior year, when seasonality matters to a fair comparison.
