NEED- Best practices for tracking PR and other 3rd party marketing initiatives

How granular are you getting with your 3rd party marketing initiative tracking? How do you determine if your PR agency is providing value outside of the number of placements? What is your PR agency KPIs?

UTM tracking is great, however, it’s very tedious to create separate UTMs for every medium your tech publication partners or PR agency is placing your content. In my experience, it is very hard to know what lever is truly making an impact. I am curious to know what tactics this community uses outside of creating/providing individual tracking URLs for each marketing campaign medium.