Cision PRWeb vs. Coveragebook

Cision PRWeb is a wonderful tool for our team of communications professionals. We typically include media mentions over a given time period in our internal reporting, and appreciate the quick notifications whenever we are mentioned somewhere. It is also much quicker than manually curating media lists when you are in a hurry to send a press release. The platform allows you to integrate your social media channels, but I would not use it to pull definitive cross-channel reports on social media performance.

Incentivized

Coveragebook is great for any organization that needs to regularly track client media coverage or even just trending news stories to send to clients in a professional looking report. It is ideal for small, medium, and large PR and marketing firms. For firms or companies more focused on internal communications, this would not be a regularly used tool. For those focused on external communications, it's a must-have tool that helps save time and makes it easier for people at every level of an organization to create branded coverage reports that are easy to download or link to and share with clients

Incentivized

• Identification of key and relevant media as a result of inputting key parameters
• Cision PRWeb provides actionable insights into media engagement
• Cision PRWeb provides a quick and easy platform on which to build and grow relationships with the media
• Cision PRWeb facilitates the entry into new vertical media markets.

Incentivized

• Screenshots of each article for the entire length of the site. It allows viewers (internally) to get an idea of what the webpage looks like.
• Can include offline media.
• Creates a slideshow presentation quickly and easily.
• Each screen grab has a URL back to the webpage to read the article.

Incentivized

• Would be nice if they didn't charge extra for a release that has is submitted the day before it is scheduled to be posted.
• The option to upload a word document instead of copy and pasting all release content into a form would be nice addition.
• Uploading social media links a representative of a client is not so easy.

Incentivized

• More ability to customize cover (title page) of report
• Provide total (collective) backlinks for all pieces of coverage as a metric (currently you can only do one at a time)
• Allow custom metrics for the offline coverage (currently, you can only add add'l info in the comments section so it looks like a quote vs. numerous metrics on the slides for online clippings)

Incentivized

We are unlikely to renew PRWeb because I feel that the costs outweigh the benefits of the service. For a company like ours (small business with about 60 employees) we don't have enough press that warrants monthly coverage. We may look at using PRWeb on an as needed basis, 3-4 times a year for single submissions, but that would be the extent of it. I could see PRWeb being much more beneficial for large companies that are constantly needing to issue press.

Incentivized

Cision appears to go out of its way to make its user interfaces terrible. Like, literally every product they offer was anywhere from slightly better to FAR better in earlier iterations. No current iteration of any Cision product is the best iteration. The UX for Cision PRWeb is no different.

Incentivized

I have only required support from PRWeb on two separate occasions and they handled my issues without any problems. I was a bit confused at first not sure if they had received my requests but shortly after I received responses and was able to move forward with my press release.

Incentivized

Coveragebook is incredibly easy to use--so easy to use that we've never run into any issues that required additional support from the Coveragebook team. In the event that there is an issue, they have a detailed help section on the website with answers to FAQs to assist professionals at every step of the process.

Incentivized

Implementation of PRWeb required very little of Strouse. It was a quick process and we were almost immediately ready to use the platform.

Incentivized

Cision PRWeb is a cheaper option among Business Wire and PR Newswire, but the ultimate outcome of what we pay them for (press release distributions) is essentially the same. That said, PR Newswire is also owned by Cision, so it suffers from the same bad user experience. I've also used EIN Presswire and eReleases (a PR Newswire reseller), both of which were not on the list of comparable products. For my money, eReleases is the single best option because of two things: spectacularly affordable price point, and awesome customer service.

Incentivized

I didn't look too closely at the other services above because it was quickly apparent that they do different things than Coveragebook. We were looking for a reporting and valuation tool but didn't need help creating or distributing releases or finding client mentions. (Our PR programs are very targeted towards relevant trade press; we aren't looking for thousands of mentions in any/all media outlets.) Coveragebook accomplishes all the tasks we required at a reasonable price.

Incentivized

• It was definitely a cost decision for us, but the ability to have access to their media database was by far the most useful and needed tool for us.
• For tracking media hits, it saved us time tracking the majority of hits. Where it didn't save us time was with smaller, more niche media.

Incentivized

• The ROI is mostly on time. I used to spend hours upon hours designing and inputting information for reports. Now, Coveragebook does all of the hard work for me.

Incentivized