The Brand Monitoring App is designed to track mentions of your brand and competitors with custom alerts that make sure you see only what’s relevant. You will be notified by email every time a new mention appears (including those with a negative sentiment) or unusual spikes in mentions occur.
Brand Monitoring allows you to set up detailed queries to track brands (yours, the competition, or others), people, keywords, or backlinks. The app will also find mentions for your query from news sites, social media, and many more, which you can filter in multiple ways to see relevant results without all the extra noise.
The Brand Monitoring app can also be used to find relevant articles and authors for SEO and PR outreach by searching for keywords that you're interested in.
How Can Brand Monitoring Help Me?
The Brand Monitoring app allows you to:
- Track your brand mentions across the web
- View useful information about brand sentiment, domain authority, estimated reach, and whether there is a backlink to your website/social media account in the brand mention
- Estimate the value of your media coverage
- Check trends, analyze metrics in time and compare results between different queries using share of voice
- And much more
Pricing
A subscription to the Brand Monitoring app is available for $59 per month, including 3 queries. More queries and higher mention limits can be purchased from the My Apps page.
+ 3 queries and 20,000 mentions monthly, +$40 per month
+ 9 queries and 90,000 mentions monthly, +$100 per month
More information about Semrush pricing can be found here.
Monitoring Mentions
Build a search query in the Brand Monitoring app to automate the process of collecting coverage of your brand or product from online media. Click the New query button to start.
New Search Query
The process of creating a new search query begins with choosing the kind of information you'd like Brand Monitoring to monitor. You can select one of the following:
- Brand: monitor a brand, see how popular it is, and view the sentiment of the articles when the brand is mentioned
- Competitor: track competitors and have the ability to compare the results on share of voice
- Keywords: track keywords/phrases of your choice
- Person: monitor people from top management, experts, new hires
- Backlinks: track how many articles with the provided URL were found in the article; use it to get an idea for how and what is the impact on SEO
And then fill in the text field with your keywords, names, or link, depending on your choice.
Once you have put in your keyword, scroll down and adjust the settings of your query.
Main filters
Here you can add more keywords, filter by country and language and adjust the timeframe for which you wish to view the mentions.
Additional keywords
You can start by inserting additionally three types of keywords that will help you get even more relevant results:
- Results MUST ALSO contain ALL of these keywords - fill in any keywords that must also be present in the mentions.
- Results CAN contain ALL of these keywords - fill in any keywords that must additionally be present in the mentions. If you add more than one keyword here, the search will guarantee that at least one of the given keywords will be present in all results.
- Results MUST NOT contain ALL/ANY of these keywords - it works the opposite way of the MUST field. Use this section to specify keywords or phrases that you don't want to have in mentions with your required keywords.
Keyword Options
You can check two additional options that will help you get more relevant results:
- Exact match: check this option to make the search work in the exact mode. When checked, it will look for articles with the exact combination of keywords you provide. Uncheck this option to allow searches with the right-hand side wildcard.
- Case sensitive: check this option to make your search match keywords only when the letter case is exactly what you provide. Uncheck to make the search case insensitive.
Backlink Tracking
Fill in the Track backlinks field for Brand Monitoring to look for it in the coverage (applies to queries configured for Brand, Competitor, Keywords, and Person). This can be a URL to your landing page, newsroom, or website that is included in an article. If you add it, it will allow you to use the backlinks filter when browsing coverage. You can find mentions with or without the URL if the keyword conditions are met.
Country, language and date range
Apart from keywords, you can use the following filters to refine your search:
- Countries - filter based on the outlet's headquarters location.
- Languages - filter based on the article's language.
Date range - select whether you prefer to view mentions published from the current moment onwards, within the last 30 days, or a custom range (up to a maximum of 30 days). This setting is especially useful if you're interested only in future mentions and don't want to use your limits on the past ones.
Email Notifications
Set up email notifications for digests and alerts to receive information on coverage found by Brand Monitoring.
The emails for digests are triggered as soon as you add your email address, and alerts are triggered when there are new mentions found under your search query and its conditions are met.
Digests
With each new search query you create, you’ll receive daily, weekly, and monthly digests featuring top mentions and statistics, such as total number of mentions, those with backlinks, and the number of mentions with positive or negative sentiment.
Alerts
For alerts, you only need to select its type and add a recipient of the email to enable the alert. The available types are:
- New mention alert: get a notification each time a new mention is found
- Negative sentiment alert: get a notification each time a new mention with negative sentiment is found. This alert has the sentiment-based filter added by default.
- Unusual spike alert: get a notification whenever there's a spike in the number of coverage, significantly higher than the average.
Sources
Next, move on to sources you want to gather mentions from.
You can search for mentions from traditional online sources or social media. Select the sources that interest you most; this way, you'll use your limits to gather the most relevant coverage.
Online
Choose from news, blogs and discussions.
To further customize your search, specify where you want to look for mentions:
- title - select to look for keywords present in the title of the article only
- text - select to look for keywords present in the body of the article only.
Social media
Monitor social media channels, including X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
What is more, you can add links to social media profiles to monitor specific pages effectively (you will still see mentions from different social media profiles in your search after filling this property, but you can filter out the ones you have added here).
You can also have a look at a sample of coverage found on the right side of the page.
Saving Your Search
When you’ve finished setting keywords and/or filters, you can go ahead and save your search by clicking Create query. Brand Monitoring will gather all of the mentions it can find on the internet. The monitoring is constantly on and as soon as any mention matching the conditions is found, you’ll find it in the dashboard. What’s more, the moment you save your search, we’ll also look for articles published in the past. We’ll look for mentions from 30 days before the query was created and onward.
Trial accounts will include results from the 30 days before the query was created (with a limit of up to 120 mentions) and all new mentions.
Browsing Mentions
As soon as you save your query, Brand Monitoring will look for all articles matching the conditions of your query. After a short while, you should get some results and you can browse and filter them.
Mention Details
Each mention will have plenty of useful information and properties:
- Author and outlet
- Estimated reach
- Domain authority
- Sentiment
There are additional metrics for social media mentions:
- Shares
- Reactions
- Comments
- Views (only for X)
Filtering Results
You can also further refine your search results by using the filters located on the left side of the page.
See the complete list of filters below for more information:
A sentiment is a summary of a mention based on machine learning. The Brand Monitoring app’s algorithm analyses the text and gives it a rating.
Available ratings are: positive, neutral, negative, or unknown.
The Source filter enables you to narrow down the results based on the source. You can choose from various sources such as news articles, blog posts, discussion groups, and social media posts.
The social media platforms covered include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.
You can also monitor print (newspapers and magazines) or broadcast (television and radio) by adding it to your subscription.
The Date range allows you to filter your mentions depending on the date they were published.
Choose between the following date ranges: today, yesterday, last 7 days, last 30 days, or a custom setting.
Author
Get mentions of articles written by a specific author.
Article Title
Filter your mentions to see only those that contain a specific word or phrase in their title.
Backlinks
Get mentions that do or do not include a link to the target URL, which you can add while building a query. It can be a link to your webpage or product landing page.
Keyword is a hashtag (only for social media mentions)
See only the mentions that include your chosen keywords as a hashtag (for example: #semrush).
Profiles are mentioned (only for social media mentions)
Mark this option to only see mentions where your social media profile was mentioned using the @ sign. You can add your social media profile handle while creating a query.
Posts created via linked profiles (only for social media mentions)
See only the mentions published by your own social media profile.
Estimated Reach
Filter out your mentions to see only those above or below a certain estimated reach number.
Rank
The rank calculation is based on estimated traffic that goes to a domain. The top 10 domains in the rank include Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Facebook. The rank is calculated by Semrush.
Name
Filter down your mentions to see only those from a specific domain by entering its name.
Authority
Machine-learning-based score of the mentioned domain. The score is measured on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the stronger authority the domain has. The score reflects a web page's overall quality and SEO performance. The calculation is based on three main metrics: quality and quantity of backlinks (link power), an estimated monthly average of organic traffic, and indications of spam factors in the link profile. It's calculated by our partner - Semrush.
Comments: Display social media posts with a certain number of comments.
Reactions: Display social media posts with a certain number of likes and other reactions.
Shares: Display social media posts with a certain number of shares.
Favorites
Each mention may be marked as a favorite for future reference. If you have any articles marked, you can use the filter Favorite to find those that have or haven’t been marked as favorites.
Blocking Domains
It may happen that there are certain domains that publish articles related to your search keywords, but you're not interested in coverage originating from these. There's a way to block them permanently and not see any mentions from them in your mentioned browser and statistics. You can access and manage all blocked domains under the Blocked domains tab.
Analytics
Go to the Analytics tab to see charts presenting various metrics related to your search query. You will see statistics including:
- Total number of mentions
- Mentions with backlinks
- Estimated reach
- Traffic
- Breakdown of sentiment
- Share of voice
- Domain categories
- Top mentions sorted by estimated reach, domain reach, domain rank, domain authority score
You can narrow down the data on the charts by using filters (explained earlier):
Managing Email Notifications
You can manage your notifications in the Email notifications tab, where you’ll find all of the alerts and digests set up for your query. You can also add new ones and delete or disable the ones you don’t need. In order to receive email notifications, your email will need to be verified first. Without the verification, the notifications won’t go out; this will be signaled by the exclamation mark icon. In order to send the same kind of alert or digest to different recipients, simply add a new one.
Data and Limits
With a paid subscription, you can create up to three queries with no keyword limits. However, the number of mentions you can gather is limited to 10,000 mentions monthly. If the limit is reached, you can wait until the new monthly period starts or buy more mentions on the My Apps page. In both cases, the process of searching for new mentions starts automatically. The new mentions are gathered every 20 minutes. Brand Monitoring finds historical mentions from the 30 days before the query was created.
If you have some queries left, but the mention limit is reached for the billing period, it won’t be possible to create a new query.
If you have any other questions about Brand Monitoring or about the App Center in general, please email us at [email protected].
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, you can see the articles that were published before the query was added to Brand Monitoring. The app searches for articles that were published 30 days before the query was created. All new mentions are collected until the limit of mentions is reached.