The answer depends on the type of product you’re trying to sell. If you are trying to sell a $10 million dollar system and your sales cycle is several years, the answer is “not directly.”  On the other hand, if you’re Southwest Airlines and are selling airline tickets off a web site, you can (and they do) most definitely track PR efforts back to sales. . The key is to have output measurements (media content analysis) as well as outtake measurements (attitude and awareness measures) as well as outcome measures (i.e. web traffic/downloads, sales lead figures or incoming calls.) in place and working together.  Pointing to a pile of clips and saying it caused sales will not work. But, if you can show that you are communicating more key messages in the media that matter and/or that your audience is hearing and believing your messages AND that web traffic or downloads spike whenever you distribute a press release, then you can definitely tie your efforts to sales. For example, in the consumer packaged goods world, product managers know what drives purchases and it is typically word of mouth, recommendations, photos and discussions of brand benefits. So they  set up a system to track their share of discussion, share of recommendations and share of brand photos relative to their competition, so they could then compare those numbers to market share and brand preference to see the correlation.

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