The whole suite offers tools to help with customer experience, social media and media monitoring, as well as influencer marketing management.

Brandwatch keeps its pricing under wraps—you’ll need to book a demo to learn more. However, we’ve done some digging and found useful details. If you're looking for tools with transparent pricing and well-defined features, you're in the right place.

Here’s a close look at the top Brandwatch competitors to consider when choosing the best option to fit your needs.

What is Brandwatch (and how much does it cost)?

Brandwatch is a media monitoring and social listening tool used to track brand mentions, sentiment, and trends across social media, blogs, forums, and news websites. It’s often chosen by marketing and insights teams to analyze online conversations and digital audience behaviors.

Brandwatch also integrates with Falcon.io to offer tools like social media publishing and influencer marketing.

Brandwatch core features

• Social listening across multiple platforms
• AI-powered sentiment analysis and audience insights
• Trend detection and influencer tracking
• Dashboards for data visualization
• Social media publishing
• CRM and analytics integrations

Most relevant for: Marketing teams, insights analysts, and large organizations that need access to broad online data streams and are investing in comprehensive customer intelligence tools.

💰 Brandwatch pricing (2025)

Brandwatch does not provide transparent pricing on its website. To access exact pricing, you must book a demo with their sales team.

However, according to third-party review sites and user-reported insights:

• Pricing per month ranges from $800 to $3,000+ depending on selected features, data volume, and the number of users (according to TrustRadius)
• Monthly pricing options are mostly unavailable, even though they are often preferred by smaller teams for their affordability and flexibility
• A 2-seat licence has been reported to cost around $10,000 per year, according to users on Reddit
• Brandwatch has three plans available: consumer intelligence, social media management, influencer marketing

For teams seeking transparent pricing and quicker onboarding, alternatives like Prowly may be easier to try and adopt—with plans starting at $369/month and a 7-day free trial.

Try Prowly's media monitoring free for 7 days

Start tracking your brand and keywords for free (no credit card required) in Prowly.

• Comprehensive monitoring: Track the web, social media, print, and broadcast mentions
• Transparent pricing: Plans start at $258/month
• All-in-one platform: Get everything you need in one tool for PR, incl. media database, outreach, reporting, and more

Learn more

Top 10 Brandwatch alternatives list

#1 Prowly – the best tool for PR & media monitoring

💸 Pricing: starts at $369 monthly

Prowly is a media monitoring and PR workflow platform purpose-built for communications teams that need clarity and control during fast-moving news cycles. Its advanced monitoring capabilities track online, print, broadcast, and social media mentions in real time—complete with sentiment analysis, reach estimates, and visual coverage reports that make insights easy to action and share.

But Prowly goes far beyond monitoring. It offers a comprehensive PR toolkit that includes access to a global media database of over one million journalists, intuitive press release creation and distribution, newsroom publishing, and powerful campaign analytics.

Unlike broader marketing tools, Prowly is tailored specifically to PR pros—making it easier to execute, manage, and prove the value of earned media strategies from a single, cohesive platform.

Brandwatch vs Prowly: key features

• Prowly shows a strong focus on PR-specific tools like media database, press release distribution, and coverage tracking, alongside media monitoring (both online and offline).
• In contrast, Brandwatch focuses more heavily on social listening and consumer intelligence, serving marketing and insights teams looking to track online trends and audience sentiment at scale.

👉 TL;DR: Prowly excels by by offering a full PR stack. It’s a Brandwatch alternative that upscales media monitoring and press contact management, making it a compelling choice for those in public relations and communication teams.

Ideal for: PR professionals and teams looking for an all-in-one, intuitive platform to manage outreach and monitor media coverage—with onboarding support included for a smooth start.

#2 Sprout Social – social media management & listening

💸 Pricing: starts at $199 monthly

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management tool. It includes social listening capabilities alongside scheduling, engagement, and analytics tools in one interface.

Brandwatch vs Sprout Social: key differences

Sprout Social:

• integrates social listening with social media management workflows
• monitors direct engagement and provides action based on insights
• provides post scheduling, queueing, and cross-channel publishing
• performs social listening for trends, keywords, and sentiment
• offers reporting dashboards and competitor analysis
• supports a unified inbox for engagement tracking

TL;DR: Sprout Social blends social listening with publishing and engagement tools, making it great for managing brand presence and conversations from one central hub.

Ideal for: Social media managers and teams needing to managing their social presence and follow conversations in one unified platform. Sprout Social offers a coherent, in-depth approach to social media.

#3 Brand24 – a budget-friendly Brandwatch alternative

💸 Pricing: starts at $199/ month

Brand24 is a more affordable yet robust social listening tool for tracking brand mentions across the web and social media.

Brandwatch vs Brand24: key differences

Brand24:

• Provides sentiment analysis and keyword tracking
• Displays influence scoring and alert setup
• Offers customizable reports and dashboards
• Has a simple, intuitive interface

TL;DR: Brand24 offers essential media monitoring features like sentiment analysis and alerts in a user-friendly package — great for smaller teams that want value without complexity.

Ideal for: Startups and small to mid-sized businesses looking for an accessible, no-frills media monitoring solution. It is a good choice for those who are looking for a cost-effective way to monitor their brand reputation and online conversations.

#4 Mention – agencies & multilingual monitoring

💸 Pricing: starts at $41/ month

Mention is a real-time media monitoring platform with multilingual support and agency tools, which stands out with its language capabilities.

Brandwatch vs Mention: key differences

Mention:

• Tracks social, blogs, forums, and news
• Provides real-time alerts and sentiment tracking
• Offers multi-user collaboration features
• Is available in multiple languages

TL;DR: With a trial, Mention is one of the few free alternatives to Brandwatch, which makes it a valuable tool for agencies and global brands.

Ideal for: Marketing agencies managing global brands and businesses with an international audience requiring monitoring in multiple languages and the ability to navigate diverse online conversations.

#5 Talkwalker – an enterprise-level data & AI insights

💸 Pricing: not transparent, but you can find estimates in our research

Talkwalker is an enterprise-grade social listening and analytics platform leveraging advanced AI to process vast amounts of data and extract deep insights.

Brandwatch vs Talkwalker: key differences

Talkwalker:

• Is an analytics-driven platform for large-scale social and media listening
• Provides image, video, and voice recognition
• Gives AI-powered trend prediction
• Offers cross-platform media coverage
• Displays visual analytics dashboards

TL;DR: It essentially offers the power of AI-driven analytics, including image and video recognition, trend forecasting, and comprehensive data visualization. A big pro - it works even for large-scale analysis.

Ideal for: All companies that deal with massive datasets daily. Large enterprises and institutions can gain sophisticated insights into brand perception and market trends.

#6 NapoleonCat – a versatile social media suite

Pricing: starts at $79 monthly

NapoleonCat is a social media management suite which can schedule, monitor engagement, provide analytics, and manage your social inbox.

Brandwatch vs NapoleonCat: key differences

NapoleonCat:

• Has broad integration with various social channels and its own ecosystem extends its listening and analytical capabilities
• Has a unified inbox for managing conversations across platforms
• Provides post scheduling and automated responses
• Offers basic social listening and sentiment tools
• Displays detailed performance analytics and reports

TL;DR: NapoleonCat is a convenient Brandwatch alternative for users who prefer an all-in-one social media solution where monitoring is a key component.

Ideal for: Businesses already using NapoleonCat for social media management who want to implement social listening into their existing workflow. As well as social media teams looking to streamline workflow, engagement, and reporting from a centralized dashboard.

#7 Meltwater – a versatile social media suite

💸 Pricing: not transparent, but you can find estimates in this research

Meltwater is a media intelligence platform that goes beyond social listening to include news monitoring, PR analytics, and influencer management.

Brandwatch vs Meltwater: key differences

Meltwater:

• Is a platform for monitoring news, social media, and influencer content
• Monitors traditional and digital media channels
• Offers PR reporting and competitive benchmarking
• Aids in influencer discovery and campaign tracking
• Provides custom dashboards and alerting tools

TL;DR: Meltwater offers a range of media intelligence tools, providing a view of brand mentions across online news, social media, and broadcast.

Ideal for: Large organizations and PR agencies who areseeking an integrated platform for media monitoring, PR measurement, and competitive intelligence across all media types.

#8 BuzzSumo – an app for content discovery & influencer tracking

💸 Pricing: starts at $199 monthly

BuzzSumo is a tool focused on content analysis and influencer identification with a strong emphasis on content insights, offering monitoring and content performance features. It also supports the following of brand mentions related to specific content.

Brandwatch vs BuzzSumo: key differences

Buzzsumo:

• Helps in identifying trending content and influential voices across the web
• Provides content performance tracking by keyword or domain
• Offers influencer identification and outreach features
• Sends alerts for trending topics and mentions
• Offers topic and backlink research tools

TL;DR: BuzzSumo offers a unique perspective on brand monitoring. It focuses on the content surrounding your brand and the influencers amplifying those conversations.

Ideal for: Content marketers and SEO professionals who are looking to understand content trends. The tool identifies influencers and tracks the reach of their content.

#9 YouScan - visual listening & AI sentiment

💸 Pricing: starts at $299 monthly

YouScan is a social listening platform that emphasizes visual content analysis. It uses AI to identify brand mentions in images and videos, which makes it a solid Brandwatch alternative for AI enthusiasts.

Brandwatch vs YouScan: key differences

YouScan:

• Is an AI-powered platform for detecting brand mentions in visual content
• Provides image and video recognition
• Performs advanced sentiment analysis
• Offers trend detection via visual data
• Povides social media and web coverage

TL;DR: YouScan stands out with its visual content recognition, making it a smart pick for brands that rely heavily on imagery and want to capture mentions beyond just text.

Ideal for: Brands with a strong visual style or those in industries where images and videos are of key importance for brand mentions and customer conversations.

#10 Statusbrew – scalable social listening

💸 Pricing: starts at $69 monthly

Statusbrew is a social media management platform that covers scalable and affordable solutions for social listening, engagement, and automation.

Brandwatch vs Statusbrew: key differences

Statusbrew:

• Is an all-in-one platform for social scheduling, engagement, and listening at an accessible price
• Provides cross-platform publishing and approval workflows
• Performs social listening and sentiment monitoring
• Allows for team collaboration and automation
• Offers scalable plans for growing businesses

TL;DR: Statusbrew provides a solid foundation for social media management and listening. It offers a cost-effective solution to establish a solid position in social media.

Ideal for: SMBs looking for a scalable social media management tool with listening capabilities that can grow with them. Offers a balance of features and pricing. Making it a reasonable Brandwatch alternative.

Brandwatch alternatives - a comparison in a nutshell

What are the best Brandwatch alternatives in 2025?

The top Brandwatch alternatives in 2025 include:

• Prowly for public relations and media monitoring with AI-driven tools
• Sprout Social for social media engagement and scheduling
• Brand24 for budget-friendly social listening
• Talkwalker for AI-driven enterprise insights
• BuzzSumo for content and influencer analysis

What is better than Brandwatch?

While most Brandwatch competitors offer similar core monitoring features, their strengths lie in the details. Some prioritize social listening depth, others leverage advanced AI, and some excel in specific areas like PR or visual analysis. Your ideal choice depends on your unique brand monitoring needs.

Pricing is another key differentiator. Brandwatch's costs are hidden, but tools like Prowly offer transparent pricing structures, which can be a crucial factor for budget-conscious users.

Is there a free trial for Brandwatch alternatives?

Yes, many Brandwatch competitors offer free trials:

• Prowly – 7-day free trial
• Brand24 – Free trial available
• Mention – Offers a limited free plan and trial
• BuzzSumo – Limited free plan with trial access
• Statusbrew – Free trial for all paid plans

What’s the best Brandwatch alternative for PR teams?

If you are checking Brandwatch competitors to find a PR-related solution, Prowly should be your pick. It's a Brandwatch alternative that fully supports public relations efforts, covering media, press distribution and reporting.

Brandwatch alternatives - summing up

Brand tracking is your key to a well-established brand reputation and maintaining relationships with your audience. It will pay off in the long term.

Be proactive, follow social discussions, sentiment and react. Do not settle for numbers only. With the right tool, you will be able to do it.

Below, you can read an in-depth comparison of Brandwatch competitors.

Top Brandwatch alternatives in 2025: a quick overview

• Prowly – All-in-one PR software with advanced media monitoring. Ideal for PR teams seeking full coverage tracking, journalist outreach, press release distribution, and analytics—all from one platform. Transparent pricing and a free trial make it easy to get started.
• Sprout Social – Social media management platform with built-in listening tools.
• Brand24 – Social listening tool that covers basic sentiment tracking and web monitoring at an accessible price.
• Mention – Multilingual media monitoring with real-time alerts.
• Talkwalker – AI-powered platform for large-scale listening and analytics.
• Meltwater – Media intelligence suite combining news, social, and influencer tools.
• BuzzSumo – Content-focused tool for tracking shareable topics and influencers.
• YouScan – Visual listening platform that uses AI to detect brand appearances in images and videos.
• Statusbrew – Scalable social media suite with publishing, automation, and listening.
• NapoleonCat – Social inbox and analytics tool for team collaboration across multiple platforms.

From PR focused Prowly to AI-powered corporate-level Talkwaker, each of them offers unique strengths tailored to your needs.

The options are plentiful, so once again, take a look at this Brandwatch competitors comparison and choose the closest portfolio of features fit to your needs.

The post Best Brandwatch Alternatives: Compare Features and Pricing in 2025 appeared first on Prowly.

The internet has smothered newspapers in popularity, but traditional media are still the most trusted news sources—and even growing stronger in the fake news era. While the number of newspapers is shrinking on a global scale, their authority and relevancy are growing. Can't miss out on print coverage if you want to build a high brand reputation and credibility.

The guide you're about to read shows how to use print media tracking to create well-informed and effective PR strategies in 2025.

What is print media monitoring in 2025?

For the sake of clarity, I'll state the obvious.

Print media monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing mentions of your brand, your clients, or relevant industry topics in printed publications.

It used to be done only manually, but, since the PR world progressed, even paper has gone digital. Well, not literally.

There are still many opportunities to earn mentions in paper publications on a national and local level. Prowly's Media Database contains insights about 14,000 newspapers and magazines in the US alone.

Why is print monitoring important (still)?

Simple reason: your audiences are reading magazines and journals and they aren't going anywhere. To name a few:

• News readers want reliable sources of information.
• Businesspeople stay for non-clickbait opinions and thorough analyses of their industry.
• Heavy smartphone users are trying to take a break from their screens.

Some industries still treat print as their top media outlets

Among them:

• Fashion and lifestyle brands want to be featured in glossy magazines.
• B2B companies care about mentions in trade publications.
• NGOs and public affairs keep print opinion magazines in their tier 1 lists.

And you can help them get there. You just need a good PR strategy fueled by print monitoring insights.

How print media monitoring works in 2025

Vintage PR pros remember the time when physically flipping through pages and cutting out clippings was the only way to get proof of print media coverage. It was slow, meticulous work—yet it's still the only way some of us do it, even though there are print monitoring tools for that.

Print monitoring tools like Prowly provide an automatic print clipping service. You get a base of magazines and journals from which you can automatically collect mentions.

But... how?

How to do print monitoring

The licensed provider buys and digitizes print content for you. From then on, it's just like any other media monitoring software:

1. You create a query for any keyword or backlink.
2. You narrow it down with advanced criteria and filters to get just the results you're looking for.
3. You browse and save the mentions in digital form.

What's the benefit of using print monitoring (other than speed and efficiency)?

You can perform offline and online media analyses on a scale you would've struggled with before.

How to analyze print media coverage

Now we're getting into the nitty-gritty.

To fully utilize your print monitoring tool, you should aim to understand the media landscape, not just find relevant mentions. That's where dashboards come in handy, helping you track what's going on, find trends and correlations, extract useful insights, and create effective strategies.

Here are the key metrics that'll help you get a better understanding and make informed decisions:

Share of voice (SOV)

SOV reveals your relative visibility. You can compare your brand's presence in print outlets to your competitors, giving you an amazing bird's-eye view of your share and possible influence.

It's the go-to metric for showing your stakeholders a stunning before and after in the competitive landscape.

Volume of print coverage

It's the simplest metric, giving insight into your overall visibility. To assess the exact impact of your PR efforts, you can track coverage patterns and trends across a specific period of time.

Print mention sentiment

But what good does just counting mentions do? Analyze the tone and context of your print coverage.

You can do that manually by reading every mention and looking for specific language and phrases that indicate sentiment. Example: "Innovative breakthrough" vs. "Controversial approach."

Or, you can use media monitoring software that detects the sentiment for you. But make sure it's correct—algorithms can make mistakes in detecting human attitudes.

Estimated reach/readership/circulation

Estimated reach can be a great addition to your media coverage reports, as long as you understand it's not extremely accurate. That's the risk of doing estimates, unfortunately.

The metric is useful if there are significant differences in reach across weeks or months.

Luckily, you don't have to take these measurements yourself; creating a readership estimate comparison could take you a few afternoons. Just choose a print monitoring platform that will do it automatically.

Keywords

Keyword tracking is great for filtering out mentions you’re not interested in. Using key phrases adds a little context to your query, so you can report only the results that reflect your real PR impact.

This way, using one query, you can create a number of charts, all filtered by different phrases, and compare the data. 

Top 7 print media monitoring tools (with pricing)

#1 Prowly

💸 Pricing: Prowly starts at $369/mo, but Print Monitoring is available in custom plans only (Enterprise)

All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: Yes

What is Prowly?

Prowly is an all-in-one PR tool built to help you obtain data-driven insights by features created to foster real, long-lasting relationships with journalists.

There are dozens of tailor-made, PR features there, and one of them is meticulous print media monitoring that gives users instant access to global, national, regional, and local newspapers, along with trade publications, consumer magazines, and business journals.

Additionally, in terms of print media monitoring capabilities, communications professionals are also able to track brands, competitors, or keyword press hits across domestic and international outlets (both print and those behind a pay wall), making it a powerful solution for businesses operating on a global scale.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Online mentions, discussion forums, social media monitoring, and broadcast and print monitoring (in partnership with LexisNexis).

→ Learn more about Prowly's Print and Broadcast Monitoring here.

You can also set up custom mention alerts and digests in Prowly, including AI coverage summaries of your chosen queries.

Who is it best for?

• Busy, small to medium PR agencies with diverse, demanding clients
• Small to medium in-house teams and brands
• Data-driven freelancers who want to show concrete mentions

🔻 Cons

• Not the best for in-house corporate communications or marketing teams managing global communication campaigns and coordinating with local teams
• Not ideal for large agency teams (50+) that require enterprise-class software and advanced team management features

#2 Brandwatch

💸 Brandwatch pricing: Undisclosed, but third-party sources say starting at $750
All-in-one PR tool: No
Free trial: No

What is Brandwatch?

Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence platform that helps professionals assess their audience engagement, helps do research, and provides metrics for stakeholders and clients.

It's also equipped with specialized features to help teams collaborate on tasks within the app itself.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Social media monitoring with secondary print media and broadcast tracking.

Who is it best for?

• Enterprise businesses
• Brands that focus on social media coverage
• Teams who engage in lots of influencer marketing campaigns

🔻 Cons 

• Not suitable if you want an all-in-one PR tool
• Might have little to offer if you're doing PR outside of socials
• Very little to no information about print monitoring quality

#3 Critical Mention (Onclusive)

💸 Critical mention pricing: According to third-party sources, around $4k to $10k per year
All-in-one PR tool: No
Free trial: No

What is Critical Mention?

Critical Mention is a media monitoring company that tracks mentions from online sources, social media, print publications, broadcasts, and podcasts.

It also offers a media database, reports, and other functionalities that help evaluate the value of earned media.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Digital, print media tracking, broadcast monitoring and mentions from print publications.

Who is it best for?

• Teams reporting on mentions only
• Wide range of media monitoring channels
• Great for large companies and established brands

🔻 Cons 

• According to reviews, its media database is lacking
• Not an all-in-one PR tool

#4 Meltwater

💸 Meltwater pricing: According to third-party sources, $12k per user per year
All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: No

What is Meltwater?

Meltwater is a media intelligence platform that offers a media database, media monitoring including newspaper monitoring, reporting, and tools to help professionals engage with their audience. It provides insights across various channels, making it a valuable solution for brands looking to track coverage across social media platforms and traditional media.

In addition to monitoring digital mentions, Meltwater also helps businesses track printed documents, such as press clippings and physical publications.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Online media tracking, social media, print, broadcast and podcast monitoring.

Who is it best for?

• Works well for enterprises and large teams
• Teams in need of a good media database
• Those who want various tracking offers

🔻 Cons 

• User reviews say it's difficult to use
• Very expensive for small businesses

→ Read more about Meltwater's alternatives and how it compares to Cision and Prowl

#5 Cision

💸 Cision pricing: According to third-party sources, starts around $8k/year
All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: No

What is Cision?

Cision is one of the oldest PR tools available, with a media database, media monitoring, press release distribution, and reporting available. As a media intelligence platform, it helps businesses track and analyze their media coverage across multiple channels, ensuring they stay informed about their brand presence and industry trends.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Online media, social media, print, broadcast and podcast.

Who is it best for?

• Great for enterprises and large teams that need media monitoring on a global scale
• Good for companies that want to use newswires
• Solid choice for well established companies

🔻 Cons 

• Might not be suitable for small businesses
• Expensive
• No free trial

→ Read more about Cision's alternatives and how it compares to Muck Rack and Prowly.

#6 Agility PR

💸 Agility PR pricing: Undisclosed
All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: No

What is Agility PR?

Agility PR is a media monitoring and analysis software that helps PR pros with their daily workflow.

What monitoring features does it offer?

The company offers the tracking of online media, social media, broadcast and print mentions, although some are subject to licensing fees.

Who is it best for?

• New users who need an easy to use toll who are not familiar with PR tools
• Teams needing a wide range of features

🔻 Cons 

• No transparent pricing
• Some print content is subject to licensing fees

#7 Muck Rack

💸 Muck Rack pricing: According to third-party sources, $10k/year
All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: No

What is Muck Rack?

Muck Rack is a software database for journalists most known for having a good contact database. Along with that feature, it also has others, such as media monitoring and reporting.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Online monitoring, social media listening, TV, radio and print monitoring.

Who is it best for?

• Large in-house teams and agencies
• Professionals who need an all-in-one

🔻 Cons 

• Can get quite expensive
• There's no free trial

💡 If you need even more details, check out this article featuring examples of Prowly alternatives, or simply ask us anything you'd like to know!

Media analysis with print media intelligence

Here are some use cases of print mention analysis. Most PR professionals have been in similar situations before.

PR crisis

A yoghurt brand issued a product recall. Your job is to monitor national and local titles to track the spread of the story, gauge public sentiment, and identify emerging issues in real time. This enables you to tailor your response and mitigate damage effectively.

All news sources are game in this situation. Social media platforms, online news, broadcast, and, you guessed it, newspapers. You can't miss out on what the most trustworthy news articles are saying.

Reputation management

Let's say a CEO of your company gives a controversial interview. The press is all over him; even trade publications cover his comments, and it's not good publicity.

You need to monitor print coverage to see how the story is being framed in various circles. This way, you can identify negative narratives and develop a plan to address them.

Read these articles to learn more about:

• PR crisis management
• Reputation management
• 16 PR Crisis Management Examples You Need to See

Investor relations

A publicly traded company has sent out a special announcement to trade publications. As a communication professional, you should monitor financial publications and business sections of newspapers to track how the news is being reported.

In this instance, media monitoring helps the brand manage investor perceptions and maintain positive relationships with the financial community.

Challenges in print monitoring

Is print tracking software the right choice for you? Let's break it down.

Comprehensive media analysis

It all depends on the scale of your operations.

If there's only a small handful of publications you'll be tracking (up to three), then you're fine with buying and browsing them yourself. But doing the same for five publications costs about $900 per year.

If your brand appears or is planning to appear in newspapers more often than that, then flipping all the pages by hand is a waste of time and resources. Buying separate subscriptions to specialized journals can cost $300-1,200 each.

Add keeping track of the competition to the mix, and analyzing paper media becomes a headache. Unless, of course, you're leveraging the right technology, such as mention alerts and AI-powered coverage summaries.

Paywalled content monitoring

Although we're witnessing a comeback to paper media, traditional magazines want to be accessible online. That's why print is evolving, adapting to consumers, and going digital.

The problem is that more and more major news outlets are closing behind paid subscriptions. Over 75% of top US newspapers and magazines have paywalls. If you want to be cost-effective about it, some tools offer access to paywalled content as part of a print monitoring service.

Overcoming the divide between offline and digital sources

Tallying up online and offline metrics is a must if you want a full overview of your brand's news coverage. Easier said than done—unless you use a reporting platform that gathers all your monitoring insights in one place.

Over to you

Keeping track of your industry on a daily basis is one of the most important PR tasks. It's also extremely time-consuming, especially when you're trying to report your work's impact.

Remember: print monitoring is not just for big corporate budgets. You can get a tool that is tailored for your needs, not for Fortune 500 clients.

The digital age complicates many things, but print media monitoring isn't one of them. Try a dedicated software yourself and see how much easier your life can be!

The post How to Use Print Media Monitoring in Your PR Strategy appeared first on Prowly.

The truth is that you don't have to imagine it, because there are keyword tracking apps that do exactly this: alert you every time someone mentions you.

Today, we’re covering ten of the very best keyword monitoring tools in the industry, along with their pros, cons, and pricing.

What is keyword monitoring?

Keyword monitoring is the process of tracking mentions of a certain keyword online, on websites, social media, forums, online communities, and on offline platforms such as newspapers, magazines, and TV broadcasts.

Keyword monitoring, media monitoring, and social media monitoring are often bundled together, which is fair, as they overlap quite a bit. But there are distinct differences too:

Wanna know more about the differences between these three? Read these articles:
➖ What's the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring in PR?
➖ Top 15+ Social Listening Tools for PR Pros
➖ How to Create a Powerful Social Listening Strategy for PR?

What makes PR keyword monitoring different from SEO keyword monitoring?

Keyword monitoring is used in both PR and SEO contexts, but it has different meanings in each.

In PR, keyword monitoring involves tracking all instances of a specific keyword (whether branded or another keyword) as it appears across different online platforms.

In SEO, keyword monitoring is about tracking the search engine performance of certain keywords. In other words, who is ranking for a certain keyword in the top results (in search engines like Google) and how your business or your clients are ranking for that keyword.

PR keyword monitoring is about what’s being said about you out in the world.
SEO keyword monitoring is about how people find you through search engines.

Top keyword monitoring tools (with PR-specific use cases)

Whether you work in-house as a part of a marketing or PR team or in an agency, a keyword monitoring tool is an excellent addition to your tech stack. Let's help you find the best keyword tracker for your needs.

#1 Prowly

Prowly is a dedicated PR software suite built for media monitoring, journalist outreach, press release publishing, and reporting. Prowly's keyword monitoring capabilities are explicitly tailored to track brand mentions, product names, executive references, and more across digital media and both online and offline platforms.

Pros:

✅ Built specifically for PR teams and agencies
✅ Combines media monitoring, pitching, and campaign reporting in one place
✅ Filters by sentiment, language, region, or domain type
✅ Lets you build custom media lists and track pitch engagement
✅ Helps build highly visual reports for stakeholders
✅ Covers both online and offline (print and broadcast) mentions

Cons:

❌ Media monitoring is only available in higher-tier plans

PR-specific use case:

A comms team launches a new product and wants to track where the brand and product names are being mentioned across the news. Prowly provides real-time alerts and sentiment analysis and lets users bundle this into a campaign report to show stakeholders engagement the release received.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $339/month with media monitoring included.

#2 Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a simple, free tool that lets you track mentions of specific keywords across Google-indexed content; such as news, blogs, and websites.

Pros:

✅ Completely free
✅ Easy to set up
✅ Delivers mentions to your inbox

Cons:

❌ No analytics or sentiment analysis
❌ No coverage of social media or paywalled content
❌ High risk of irrelevant results or missed mentions

PR-specific use case:

A small PR team sets up alerts for a brand name and competitor to stay updated on basic media coverage without needing a full monitoring platform.

💸 Pricing: Free

#3 Brand24

Brand24 is a media and social monitoring platform that tracks mentions of keywords across websites, forums, blogs, and social media. It’s popular among PR, marketing, and brand teams.

Pros:

✅ Covers social media, blogs, and forums in addition to news
✅ Real-time alerts with sentiment analysis
✅ Influencer scoring and reach metrics
✅ Team collaboration tools

Cons:

❌ The interface can be overwhelming for beginners
❌ Historical data and premium features are only available in higher plans

PR-specific use case:

A PR team managing a brand reputation campaign uses Brand24 to track the volume and tone of media mentions across different online channels, including Reddit and Twitter.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $199/month

#4 Mention

Mention offers media and social listening tools to monitor keywords, track sentiment, and analyze conversations in real time across digital platforms.

Pros:

✅ User-friendly dashboard
✅ Good real-time capabilities
✅ Includes social listening and analytics
✅ Offers automation rules for alerts

Cons:

❌ Limited historical data in lower plans
❌ May miss some smaller media outlets

PR-specific use case:

A boutique PR agency tracks client brand mentions across the web and Twitter and uses Mention’s sentiment filter to flag potential reputation risks.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $49/month

#5 Meltwater

Meltwater is a high-end media intelligence platform offering extensive global coverage across news, broadcast, print, social media, and podcasts. It’s designed for large PR and comms teams.

Pros:

✅ Access to premium and paywalled news sources
✅ Broadcast and print coverage
✅ Strong analytics, share of voice, and campaign tracking tools
✅ Integrates with newsroom and CRM tools

Cons:

❌ Expensive and complex to set up
❌ Locked-in contracts with custom pricing

PR-specific use case:

A global PR team needs to monitor a brand crisis across multiple markets and languages. Meltwater provides cross-platform media insights, historical context, and customizable dashboards.

💸 Pricing: Meltwater pricing is estimated at $15,000/yr to $20,000/yr.

#6 Talkwalker

Talkwalker offers powerful media and social listening features, plus visual recognition tools to track brand logos and keywords in images and videos.

Pros:

✅ AI-driven sentiment analysis and trend spotting
✅ Visual brand recognition
✅ Tracks across social, news, broadcast, and podcasts
✅ Competitor benchmarking

Cons:

❌ Enterprise-level pricing
❌ Setup and onboarding can take time

PR-specific use case:

A brand manager uses Talkwalker to detect logo placements and mentions during a sponsored event, monitoring both text and image-based content across media.

💸 Pricing: Starts at ~$9,600/year (custom plans)

#7 Semrush

While primarily an SEO platform, Semrush includes a brand monitoring tool that lets users track mentions of any keyword across the web, including backlinks and media sites.

Pros:

✅ Combines PR and SEO visibility in one dashboard
✅ Tracks new backlinks and brand mentions
✅ Shows domain authority and estimated traffic

Cons:

❌ Limited social media coverage
❌ Not PR-specific, it lacks sentiment and journalist insights

PR-specific use case:

A digital PR team uses Semrush to track the number of backlinks and mentions earned from their latest campaign and evaluates media authority.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $139.95/month

#8 Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool that includes alerts for brand mentions and backlinks, helping digital PR teams keep track of earned media value from campaigns.

Pros:

✅ Strong backlink monitoring
✅ Tracks unlinked brand mentions
✅ Includes SEO metrics like domain rating

Cons:

❌ No sentiment analysis or PR dashboards
❌ Not focused on traditional media or journalist relationships

PR-specific use case:

A PR team running a link-building campaign uses Ahrefs to track which articles mention the brand and whether they include a link — helping them follow up with journalists.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $129/month

#9 Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management platform with strong listening features. It helps PR teams track keyword mentions and sentiment on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Pros:

✅ Strong sentiment and trend analysis
✅ Unified inbox for team collaboration
✅ Visual reports for brand health and awareness
✅ Competitor comparison tools

Cons:

❌ No coverage of traditional media (news, blogs)
❌ Price scales quickly with team size

PR-specific use case:

A PR team monitors public sentiment around a new ad campaign, tracking hashtags and branded keywords in real time during rollout.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $199/month

#10 Social Searcher

Social Searcher is a lightweight social media monitoring tool that lets you track keyword mentions across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and web blogs. It focuses on real-time insights and is a good fit for individuals or small teams who want simple monitoring without enterprise-level complexity.

Pros:

✅ Free tier available with basic monitoring
✅ Tracks keywords across multiple social platforms
✅ Sentiment analysis included
✅ Exports to Excel and offers basic analytics

Cons:

❌ Limited media coverage outside social channels
❌ Dated interface and limited automation
❌ No journalist database or PR-specific outreach features

PR-specific use case:

A small business or solo PR pro uses Social Searcher to monitor real-time reactions on social media to a product launch or press coverage, especially looking for user sentiment and influencer engagement.

💸 Pricing: starts at 8.49EUR/month

Free vs. paid keyword tracking tools

Free keyword tracking tools offer tons of value, but they have certain limitations. If you're just keen to try out keyword tracking, starting with a free tool makes a lot of sense.

However, if you're looking to utilize a keyword monitoring tool on a daily basis, considering paid tools is the smarter move. Here is how to know which one to go for.

✅ Go with a free tool if you:

• Only need basic alerts (e.g., mentions of your brand name or a campaign hashtag)
• Are okay with limited sources (most free tools focus on the web or the news, not forums, podcasts, or social)
• Don’t need detailed metrics or analytics — just want to be notified when something pops up
• Have a tight budget and can afford to miss some mentions or dig manually for insights
• Are testing the waters or running a short-term campaign

🛠 Examples: Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts, Social Searcher (basic plans)

💼 Choose a paid tool if you:

• Need real-time alerts across multiple channels, including news, social media, blogs, and podcasts
• Want access to sentiment analysis, audience reach, or share of voice
• Manage multiple campaigns or clients and need dashboards, tags, or exports
• Want to measure PR impact over time with consistent tracking and reporting tools
• Need reliable support and integrations (e.g., Slack, email digests, or media lists)

🛠 Examples: Prowly (media monitoring), Brand24, Meltwater, Mention

Four tips to make the most of your keyword monitoring

To make the most out of keyword monitoring in your PR and marketing team, you need to treat it as a crucial marketing activity, not as an afterthought. Here are some of our top tips to get the most out of keyword monitoring.

1️⃣ Set up alerts for spokespersons, execs and other relevant people in your business.

This way, you'll get a notification every time they're mentioned by bloggers, content creators, and other businesses.

2️⃣ Monitor campaign keywords in real time.

Instead of waiting for reports to come in every week or month, monitor your keywords as they come into your dashboard. This helps you prevent crises and spot opportunities as they appear.

3️⃣ Track competitors and industry trends.

Monitoring your own branded terms is a great start, but you can also keep an eye on the competition and broader industry terms.

4️⃣ Pair monitoring with media outreach for optimal results.

If you see certain outlets covering relevant keywords (e.g., your competitors or important industry terms), use outreach tools to get in touch with the journalist(s). They might be interested in talking about you too.

Conclusion

Keyword monitoring can help you stay on top of who mentions you, when, and in what context. The best keyword tracking tools are those that combine keyword monitoring with other PR-specific features, such as sentiment analysis, press release and pitching tools, a media database, and others.

In other words, your PR team needs Prowly. It lets you monitor, create beautiful and comprehensive reports, and prove the value of ROI to every stakeholder involved.

The post Top Keyword Monitoring Tools for PR Pros in 2025 appeared first on Prowly.

Luckily, media monitoring costs are probably a lot less expensive than you’re thinking and will save you and your team hours of time, provide you with timely, reliable data, and arrange it into easy-to-digest reports where clear actions can be taken.

The value is just too tremendous to pass up. In today’s PR & marketing environment, this is exactly the way you need to view media monitoring services when you conduct a cost-benefit analysis of media monitoring costs.

Media monitoring has quickly become one of the foundations of digital PR & marketing. If the term is new to you, media monitoring means observing and collecting key customer data directly from mentions and discussions about your company (or your client’s company). These discussions take place in social media comments, product review websites, blogs, podcasts, discussion forums, and media websites.  

How much does media monitoring cost?

In general, media monitoring tools begin at $200 a month for the most basic monitoring and around $5000 per year for enterprise-level services.

Services are subscription-based, either monthly or annually, and most pricing isn’t available directly on websites. Apart from Prowly, which has transparent pricing plans starting from $258 per month, most media monitoring providers require getting in touch to get a custom quote.

However, based on customer discussions online, we can estimate the following costs: 

It's important to remember that for tools without transparent pricing, the figure can greatly differ based on the number of users, the specific features required, volume of mentions, and simply how well you negotiate.

What goes into media monitoring pricing?

Media monitoring services vary, which is good because every company has different needs.

As you begin to shop around, some considerations will be your notification requirements, the number of channels you want to monitor, the number of users who’ll be involved, the dashboard ease, any need for customization, and the types of reports you’ll want to collect.

Not sure which level of service your team needs? Fortunately, some of these services, like Prowly, offer media monitoring free trials, so you can test them out and make sure they include the specific features your team is looking for.

Here are the features and benefits you and your team should consider when pricing out your options:

• The number of clients and keywords you’ll need to monitor
• The total number of channels you’ll want to monitor. There are many to choose from! Do you need coverage for media outlets only, or also social media?
• The number of users. How many team members will need access to the service?
• Your agency reporting needs. Will the service’s standard ones work, or will you require the ability to build custom reports? Do you need these reports to be scheduled for automatic delivery?

If you compare media monitoring costs against running a focus group, either in-house or with an outside agency, you’ll quickly understand why many marketing and PR teams consider media monitoring costs an investment rather than an expense.

But, before you start signing up for media monitoring free trials and evaluating each service against its real cost, you should first understand the business value of media monitoring.

You can also learn all about using social monitoring for PR from The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations.

How media monitoring costs actually save businesses money

Yes, it’s true! Media monitoring is a business investment and provides real ROI when you make note of its major benefits. Here are the most significant ones:

It allows the company to “hear” what customers love

Your product or service may offer several benefits to the customer, but maybe only one or two of those benefits really get customers excited. Uncovering those special features will allow you to focus on them in your marketing, increasing the effectiveness of your ads and PR campaigns and helping you create more sales.

In many ways, media monitoring provides the invaluable benefits of hosting a focus group; you’re just sitting behind your computer screen instead of one-way glass.

Are your customers saying they wish your product had this or that? Are they pointing out what they like better about your competition? With the ear-to-the-ground benefits of media monitoring, you’ll find yourself taking notes not only for the marketing team, but for the product development team as well. 

It creates the opportunity to provide outstanding customer service

In a timely fashion, you can see customer complaints and respond to them quickly. Public responses from the company show a commitment to listening to customers and taking negative feedback seriously. This is your opportunity to turn unhappy customers into loyal customers who provide valuable word-of-mouth referrals. 

It serves as a collection point for customer testimonials

We all know that customer testimonials are PR & marketing gold. That’s why you don’t want to overlook your company’s most loyal, raving fans.

When you’re committed to media monitoring, you can spot them, reward them, and keep them spreading the word. The social proof and personal recommendations that your best customers provide are worth the cost of media monitoring alone.

In some cases, you may even spot industry influencers praising your product (in fact, many influencers call out their favorite brands specifically to catch their attention). Your brand would benefit from reaching out to these influencers and arranging future marketing collaborations.

It alerts a company early to a potential crisis

From time to time, a company inadvertently releases a marketing campaign, announcement, or product launch that isn’t accepted well by its customers, or even the general public. In these instances, an immediate corporate response is vital, so catching customer sentiment early on is a tremendous advantage. 

These early flags are invaluable to anyone managing a brand’s reputation. Since a brand’s reputation is one of its greatest assets, this makes media monitoring a type of protection, or insurance, tool.

And, if you've had enough of writing coverage summaries by hand to report to your stakeholders, tools like Prowly do that for you. Not only can you create customized alerts filtered by specific keywords, but you can also send automated, AI-summarized digests to external recipients.

It highlights what your competition is doing better, and worse, than you

Media monitoring of your competition will put a spotlight on how your customers and potential customers see them. What advantages and drawbacks do they see from each of you? Where is the competition-winning over potential customers and how are they doing it? What is the public sentiment like around each company? The customers are having these conversations online every day, and you need to be listening closely. 

It finds those media mentions for you

This is definitely music to any PR professional’s ears. Spend your time pitching and landing stories, then leave your media monitoring service to alert you when the articles are published. Once you have the alert, jump on promoting the new article. Share it on the company’s social media platforms, add it to the company website, and send the editor a big thank-you.

It’s an excellent measurement tool for your PR campaigns

You’ve launched what you believe to be an incredible PR campaign around your company’s or client’s product. Besides tracking media mentions, you’ll want to look further down the line to customer reactions from the media mentions. Media monitoring allows you to learn whether the coverage has resulted in an increase in online discussion, shares, and comments.

There's one more thing to remember when choosing a media monitoring service: social media listening.

Not every tool monitors social media channels, where many key conversations happen. Make sure to check which digital spaces are included in the plan you're opting for. And in case you're looking for a social listening tool, check out this list and get to know the difference between media monitoring and social media listening.

It helps you plan future PR & marketing content

Sometimes customers are using your product or service in ways you hadn’t even imagined, or maybe your product is solving a particular problem for them that you overlooked. Media monitoring is excellent at pointing out trends, so pay close attention to the trending topics in your customer discussions and create more content around them on your website, blog, and social media channels.

It delivers significant in-house labor savings

There are some things only we can do, and some things we have to admit a software program can manage better. Collecting and analyzing customer feedback across multiple platforms and websites is a lot of work. A media monitoring service can do the work in minutes and leave your team to the more valuable step of acting on the customer feedback.

Take it for a spin: Media monitoring free trials

Since some of the best media monitoring tools offer free trials, it’s worth taking one or two promising ones for a spin. As an agency owner or in-house team leader, you may not feel like you have the time to lead the search, but time invested upfront in finding and setting one up will save you and your team time in the future. 

Plus, it will provide your team with another important tool for showing the value of your PR and marketing efforts. You may even find a team member who would love the opportunity to give these services a try and report back on their findings. Since they are often closest to the daily tasks of the campaigns, they’re most likely to assess the true time savings and the extra service value-add. 

Ready to start testing media monitoring tools? Try Prowly.

It's an all-in-one workflow automation solution for PR professionals, where companies of all sizes can manage media relations more effectively by saving time on routine tasks, including media monitoring.

And if you're interested in a customized plan that aligns with your specific goals, or you just want to add print and broadcast monitoring to your toolkit, simply provide your contact information, and we'll handle the rest.

Cover photo by Ibrahim Boran

The post How Much Does Media Monitoring Cost (2025 Pricing Guide) appeared first on Prowly.

While many monitoring tools fall short when it comes to broadcast coverage, Prowly bridges the gap. With a powerful suite of tools designed to track both online and offline sources, you can confidently stay ahead of the broadcast media game.

Start tracking mentions across TV and radio stations:

All the tools you need to monitor, report, and respond—packed into one seamless solution.

• Real-time insights: Monitoring your brand across multiple media channels requires speed and precision. Prowly provides real-time insights, helping you react quickly to mentions and navigate crises.
• All monitoring and reporting tools in one place: Say goodbye to switching between platforms. With Prowly, you can track online, social, broadcast, and print coverage in one place, saving time and optimizing your workflow.
• Capture every mention beyond TV and radio stations: Traditional tools usually omit mentions on TV or radio, leading to significant gaps in coverage. Prowly bridges the gap with Radio and TV media monitoring, tracking online and offline sources so no mention goes unnoticed.

The importance of broadcast monitoring in PR

To understand the value of broadcast media monitoring, let’s break down what it is, why it matters, and how it’s used.

What is broadcast monitoring?

Broadcast monitoring, including the monitoring of TV and radio, offers real-time insights into your brand’s presence across TV and radio both locally and globally. It helps you stay informed about where and when your brand is mentioned, making it easier to manage communication across channels.

Why is broadcast monitoring important?

Broadcast monitoring software is crucial because it provides real-time insights, comprehensive analytics, and sentiment analysis, which are essential for making informed decisions.

By tracking broadcast media coverage, you can measure the impact of your campaigns, manage your brand’s reputation, and respond swiftly to publicity. This ensures you maintain a proactive approach, allowing you to enhance your strategies and achieve better results.

Use cases for broadcast media monitoring

#1. Measuring campaign effectiveness

• Evaluate the reach and impact of PR campaigns by tracking mentions across TV and radio broadcasts, including comprehensive TV monitoring.
• Analyze sentiment and frequency to determine the success of your messaging.

#2. Brand reputation management

• Monitor how your brand is portrayed in broadcast content, including detailed TV and radio monitoring, to ensure comprehensive coverage.
• Quickly address negative publicity and capitalize on positive coverage.

#3. Competitive analysis

• Track your competitors’ media presence and strategies.
• Identify opportunities and threats in the marketplace.

#4. Crisis management

• Receive real-time alerts and respond swiftly to any potential PR crises.
• Monitor ongoing coverage to adjust strategies and manage public perception effectively.

#5. Market research and trend analysis

• Keep informed about industry trends and emerging topics.
• Use broadcast data to guide strategic planning and content creation.

#6. Content verification

• Ensure that your ads and sponsored broadcast content are aired as contracted.
• Verify that the content is reaching the intended audience.

Challenges in traditional broadcast news monitoring

Managing broadcast media coverage comes with its own set of hurdles. For PR professionals, traditional monitoring methods often fall short, making it difficult to stay on top of mentions across all platforms.

That’s where broadcast media monitoring services like Prowly can help by offering comprehensive tracking of TV, radio, and online mentions, ensuring you’re always in the loop.

#1 Challenge: Broadcast coverage gap

Many monitoring tools leave PR teams with an incomplete picture. While mentions across online media are often tracked effectively, mentions on TV and radio frequently slip through the cracks, leaving PR professionals struggling to capture the full scope of their media presence.

Similarly, print media monitoring tools are essential for tracking newspaper and magazine coverage, ensuring PR teams capture the full scope of their media presence.

Solution: Prowly offers a comprehensive broadcast monitoring service that will monitor both online and offline sources, ensuring no mention goes unnoticed, and provide a complete view of your media presence with global coverage.

#2 Challenge: Using different tools to monitor different channels

Managing multiple tools for monitoring different channels is inefficient. Switching between different software, managing multiple subscriptions, and compiling fragmented data can be time-consuming and reduce productivity.

Solution: Prowly brings everything under one roof. It gives you easy access to data, streamlines workflows, optimizes campaigns and makes brand monitoring more efficient with tailored monitoring services for both traditional and digital media.

#3 Challenge: Operating in multiple countries or regions with global broadcast monitoring

You will require localized monitoring solutions if you operate in multiple countries or regions. Standard tools rarely provide tailored insights for different markets.

Solution: Prowly's broadcast and radio monitoring tracks mentions across various regions including the US, Canada, the UK, and the Global market, ensuring you capture relevant broadcast content for your market.

Broadcast monitoring tools to know

There are several tools that specialize in tracking TV and radio content. Some offer speech-to-text technology, keyword alerts, and even clip exports.

Popular broadcast monitoring solutions include:

• Critical Mention
• TVEyes
• Meltwater (broadcast add-on)
• Onclusive

In the next section, we’ll focus on how broadcast monitoring works inside Prowly.

Introducing Prowly's broadcast monitoring

Broadcast media software lets you better understand the media landscape by analysing your media presence across TV and radio on both local and global scales.

Here's how we ensure you get accurate results:

1. Customizable queries: When creating a new query, users can choose which broadcast sources they want to monitor—including comprehensive coverage of TV and radio stations.
2. Historical mentions: Access up to 90 days of historical mentions from broadcast sources, allowing for trend analysis of broadcast content and strategic planning of future PR campaigns. With real-time access to media insights, you can stay ahead of the conversation and respond proactively.
3. Advanced filtering options: A new filter category called Broadcast Filters has options that work exclusively for broadcast mentions, including radio stations, such as:
   • TV monitoring service scope: Users can filter for clippings and TV mentions by national or local scope. This feature ensures you get precise and relevant data.
   • Clip type: Determine whether the mention was a part of a premiere, repeat, live, taped, or new, providing a detailed view of your broadcast coverage. Monitoring TV show premiers alone is no longer a challenge.

💡 P.S. To do clippings the new (=fast and effective) way, read our Practical Guide to Mastering PR Exposure.

4. New metrics in dashboards:

• Top broadcast clips: Mentions can be sorted by Estimated Reach or Publicity Value, which helps identify the most impactful mentions.

• Publicity value: Similarly to AVE, this metric shows coverage value based on the advertising cost of a 30-second spot in the market, offering a clear view of your media impact.

5. AI summaries of monitoring mentions: If you want external stakeholders, clients, or the C-suite to receive detailed daily, weekly, or monthly reports about your broadcast mentions, AI can do it for you. Just schedule a digest for your chosen queries, and Prowly's AI will summarize your media coverage.

6. Dashboard widgets: Existing widgets in the dashboards are also functional for broadcast mentions, including:

• Number of mentions
• Estimated reach
• Share of voice
• Sentiment analysis

These enhancements give you the data you need—accurate, relevant, and all in one place. Prowly's TV and radio broadcast monitoring tool helps you monitor media presence, spot trends, and make smart decisions more easily.

Conclusion

We’re excited to introduce Prowly’s new radio and TV broadcast monitoring software—a comprehensive, all-in-one solution crafted to simplify how you track online and offline media mentions. With customizable search options and intuitive dashboards, this tool is built to meet the needs of busy PR professionals.

It’s a cost-effective way to monitor your brand across multiple channels and regions, providing you with actionable insights to fine-tune your PR campaigns effortlessly.

Ready to take your media monitoring to the next level? Schedule a demo with our team and see how Prowly can help you monitor your brand's mentions across all channels.

Frequently asked questions

What is broadcast media monitoring?

Broadcast monitoring involves tracking TV and radio broadcasts to evaluate media coverage and effectively assess PR campaign results. It helps to understand a company's presence in the media landscape and accurately measure impact.

What challenges does traditional broadcast monitoring face?

Traditional broadcast monitoring methods are time-consuming, often inaccurate, and can have coverage gaps, making them costly and inefficient. These challenges underscore the need for more effective monitoring solutions.

How does Prowly's broadcast monitoring solution stand out?

Prowly's broadcast monitoring solution stands out as an all-in-one tool for PR. It allows you to centralize all PR activities in one place, is cost-effective, and streamlines the entire PR process from start to finish.

The post Broadcast Monitoring Services: Guide on Tracking TV & Radio Mentions appeared first on Prowly.

When building advanced queries, Boolean can be cumbersome, ineffective, and prone to human error. One small mistake and your results can drastically change. But it’s still the most reliable search system. Is it?

There’s a simpler way to create effective queries. Here’s Prowly’s new take on how to quickly create monitoring searches that work.

Digital and social media, print and broadcast—track them all in one place, within a single query, dashboard, or project. Schedule a demo to see Prowly’s media monitoring in action.

How to create queries that collect relevant media mentions

The short answer is: check and refine.

There’s no going around it; your first monitoring searches will probably be pretty inaccurate. Instead of getting an initial spam tsunami, get a tool with a results preview built into the query creator.

And, if you’ve already created a query and your news scans are collecting too many irrelevant results, it’s time to revise the search. Exclude some terms to narrow it down or add more possible keywords to expand.

A self-serve tool like Prowly lets you edit queries yourself without erasing previous results or valuable historical data.

Get the Enterprise plan to unlock unlimited query-building sessions with a dedicated expert.

But what’s the secret to building effective queries in Prowly? It’s just four steps.

Step 1. Choose your search type

There are five types of search queries in Prowly:

The first four operate in pretty much the same way: you enter one or more key phrases, include or exclude some terms, and voila. The labels Brand, Competitor, Person, or Keyword make it easier to differentiate between all your queries.

The Backlink query is a separate type, used only to track a single URL. This is useful if you’re focused on whether a particular link appears in the media.

If you'd like to add backlink tracking to your standard queries, this will be explained in Step 3: Filters.

Step 2. Operators and how to use them

Prowly’s query builder is based on three types of criteria:

• ALL (AND operator)

Used to find only the mentions that match all given keywords. This is a great way to hyper-focus your search on irreplaceable phrases.

• ANY (OR operator)

Finds all results with at least one of the keywords given. Use ANY if you want to expand your query or fill in the missing context.

• NONE (NOT operator)

Excludes all mentions containing any of your listed keywords. NONE helps filter out unwanted terms from your search.

The main criteria

They are the focus of your search. Here you can use either ALL or ANY. If you want to add more than one key phrase, you can type them in separately or paste all at once, separated by commas, and press Enter.

NOTE: If you’ve got keywords from old Boolean strings lying around, you can paste up to 15 phrases in one box (500 characters in total). Remember to replace all AND or OR operators with commas.

You modify the primary search by using…

Optional criteria

They are the additional modifiers for your query. 

If your main criterion is ALL, then your optional criteria can be ANY and/or NONE.

If your main criterion is ANY, then your optional criteria can be ALL, ANY, and/or NONE.

What does that mean in practice?

Example 1. You’re monitoring the Prowly brand, but it’s often misspelled as Prowley. You want the results to contain mentions of AI. Your main and optional criteria will look something like this:

Example 2. You’re monitoring Prowly in the context of their top feature, AI Assistant. You want none of your results to mention ChatGPT or Gemini. This is what the search looks like:

Easy, isn’t it?

There are just two more elements you need to consider at this point. They’re your keyword options:

1. Exact match—check this option if you don’t want to find any keyword variations. For example, a non-exact match is “Apples” or “Apple’s” instead of just “Apple”.
2. Case sensitive—tick this box if you want your results to match the exact capitalization you used in your search. Example: the noun “apple” when you’re searching for the brand “Apple”.

Looks like we’ve got this step covered! What’s next?

Step 3. Filters

At this stage, you can select the countries, languages, and date ranges for the media you’re about to monitor. Depending on your chosen source, you can track up to one year of historical data.

The Main filters section is also where you can add a URL to track. What’s the difference between the Track backlinks filter and creating a Backlink query? 

A Backlink query finds only mentions that include your chosen URL.

The Track backlinks filter means your results may or may not contain your given URL. To find the ones that do, you can filter them out in the mention browser or dashboard widget.

Step 4. Selecting your source

The last stage is to choose your media channel. At Prowly, you can monitor all sources in one place:

Once you’ve selected your sources, you can check the results preview. It shows you up to 15 random mentions so you can see if your query needs more finessing. Broadcast mentions cannot be previewed.

Now that you know the theory, how about some real-life scenarios?

How to build effective queries: use cases

1. Your search term is often misspelled

Typos happen, even to the best of journalists.

Make sure the keyword you’re looking for isn’t commonly misspelled. If it is, use the ANY criterion so each version of the word pops up in your search.

PRO TIP: Broadcast crawlers search for key phrases in transcripts, which often contain incorrect spellings. Make your query more precise by adding a few variants of your brand’s name or common misspellings of your keyword.

2. Your brand goes by many names

You no longer need to set up separate queries to gather all your brand mentions. Use ANY to find each variation of your brand’s name.

3. Putting keywords in context

Don’t want your query to exist in a vacuum? Use the main and additional criteria to narrow down your search to particular topics.

For example, if you’re looking for media narratives about your product launch, type in your brand name and product name in the ALL criterion.

Or, if your tech brand is often conflated with a common fruit, use NONE to rule out all food-related associations.

4. A competitor’s name is an acronym and a common word

This situation is similar to use case 2, except that, next to the ANY criterion, you need to add the Case sensitive filter, too. It’ll make sure your brand name isn’t taken for a common noun.

But remember: Case sensitive doesn’t work for broadcast mentions, since transcripts often don’t offer proper capitalization.

If you’re searching for acronyms in broadcast, add spaces between the letters, e.g., “I C E” instead of “ICE”. This will help pick up the right mentions instead of results containing the noun ice.

5. Monitoring a brand and its spokespeople

Has your brand launched a thought leadership campaign? Type your brand name(s) in the main criteria and add ANY as your additional criteria.

The query must find your brand’s name alongside at least one of these names.

6. Various alphabets

Are you looking for your CEO’s name in more than one alphabet? Use ANY to make sure the query finds all possible spellings in the media outlets you’re interested in.

Bonus tip: how to do news scans

If you don't have the right workflow, they can take hours from your day. News scans are daily, weekly, or monthly updates about your media monitoring results.

What a news scan should contain

What do your stakeholders and clients look for in a news scan? The gist. The story. The message behind your coverage.

Rarely does anybody have the time to browse through dozens of mentions every day. A nice, succinct summary of the sentiment and overall narrative is what they're looking for.

How to automate news scans

Writing those summaries by hand takes way too much time.

In Prowly, you can schedule recurring monitoring digests with AI summarizing one or more of your queries. Just create a search query, go to Email notifications and create a custom monitoring digest.

Prowly's AI generates an overall summary and key takeaways from the mention scan.

See how simple media monitoring can be

Now that you’re all caught up, you can start creating new media monitoring searches. Building queries doesn’t have to be as complicated and exhausting as Boolean. 

The post How to Create Effective Media Monitoring Queries (with Real-Life Examples) appeared first on Prowly.

The good news is that there are many media monitoring services available. The bad news is that there are many media monitoring services available. No doubt: with so many choices, it can be overwhelming to decide which one is best. 

To make it easier to choose the best media tracking tool for your needs, we've reviewed the top platforms. You’ll find the pros and cons of each solution below, as well as what to consider when narrowing down your options.

What are media monitoring tools?

Media monitoring tools are software platforms that scan a wide range of media sources—from traditional news to social media—for mentions of specific keywords, brands, or topics.

From tracking mentions of your brand to crisis detection and measuring the ROI of your campaigns, these tools are a must-have for every PR professional.

It should be made clear that the term “media monitoring” is an overarching umbrella that includes a few sub-categories:

• Media monitoring tools track general industry news that’s important to you and your clients.
• Brand monitoring tools track the specific mentions of your brand.
• Social media monitoring tools track conversations about your brand on social media platforms.

The majority of PR monitoring software available on the market will cover all of these types of monitoring in one comprehensive service. 

Top 13 media monitoring services compared

Most media tracking platforms offer similar core functionalities, with key differences in specific details, features, and channels. When comparing these services, consider the following:

Ultimately, your choice may depend on additional considerations such as other tools provided as part of an all-in-one PR platform, overall integration capabilities, user interface design, ease of use, and personal preference.

We've reviewed the top 13 media monitoring tools below, along with their pricing and key features so that you can find the best solution for your needs.

Media Monitoring Software Overview

Prowly

Prowly is an all-in-one public relations management platform designed to help teams build media relationships and earn coverage​. It offers a media contacts database, press release creator, email pitching tools, and analytics to track engagement​.

PR pros can use Prowly to manage journalist outreach, host an online newsroom, and monitor press results all in one place.

Prowly includes integrated media monitoring across digital, social, and traditional channels. Even on its basic plan, users can track online news mentions in real time; upgrading unlocks social listening on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, with enterprise plans adding broadcast and print monitoring​, including NLA-licensed outlets and paywalled publications.
​
The platform lets you set up keyword-based “mentions” alerts and provides dashboards for analyzing coverage sentiment (positive/neutral/negative) and reach across web, social, print, and TV/radio sources.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Real-time alerts for brand mentions
• Multi-channel monitoring (online, social, broadcast, print)
• Competitor coverage tracking

Cision

Cision is one of the most established PR software suites, known for its extensive media database and media monitoring capabilities. It’s a comprehensive platform that helps PR professionals target journalists, distribute press releases, monitor media coverage across channels, and measure impact​.

Cision offers media monitoring across all major channels – online news, print publications, broadcasts, and social media – integrated into what it calls the Cision Communications Cloud.
​
Users can set up complex boolean queries and get real-time alerts when their company is mentioned in articles or on TV/radio​.​

Cision’s monitoring is paired with analytics: you can track sentiment, share of voice, reach, and even tie coverage to business outcomes using their attribution tools.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Comprehensive global media coverage (online, print, broadcast, social)
• Advanced real-time alerts and searches
• Built-in analytics for measuring media impact

💡 Want to make the most of your print coverage? Discover how to turn print media monitoring into a powerful part of your PR strategy.

Muck Rack

Muck Rack is a popular PR software platform that combines a media database of journalists with news monitoring and PR reporting tools. It’s known for being more modern and social-media-integrated than legacy databases. For PR pros, Muck Rack offers the ability to find and target journalists, send them pitches (either via the platform or your email), and track coverage and engagement.

Muck Rack has strong media monitoring capabilities, especially for online news. The platform checks millions of online sources continuously​. The moment a story mentioning your company or keywords goes live, it often appears in your Muck Rack feed.

You can set up custom alerts for your brand, competitors, industry terms, etc., and get notified in real time when new articles hit. Muck Rack’s monitoring isn’t limited to news websites; it also tracks blogs and can pull in tweets from journalists.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Instant online news alerts
• Journalist-linked monitoring for easier follow-ups
• AI-powered insights on media impact

Meltwater

Meltwater is a media intelligence platform that helps PR and communications professionals monitor and analyze media coverage and social media in real time​.

Known for its powerful media monitoring, it continuously crawls over 300,000 news sources, millions of blogs, and social media platforms to capture mentions of your brand, competitors, or any keywords you specify.

Users can build complex searches with boolean logic and filters (by location, language, source type, etc.), automatically tagging mentions as positive, neutral, or negative – and can detect spikes in volume that might indicate a brewing issue​.

Meltwater’s dashboards allow you to visualize media trends (share of voice, sentiment over time, geographic spread of mentions) and it can even integrate with third-party data to correlate media coverage to business outcomes (like web traffic or sales).

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Extensive global media source tracking
• Real-time alerts and trend detection
• Combined news and social media monitoring

Agility PR

Agility PR is an integrated PR platform designed to streamline media outreach, monitoring, and reporting workflows. Positioned as a versatile tool for PR professionals, it combines an extensive media database with comprehensive monitoring features, enabling users to efficiently identify relevant journalists, distribute press releases, track coverage, and measure results in one centralized location.

Agility PR provides extensive media monitoring capabilities across multiple media types, including online news, print, broadcast (TV and radio), and social media.

The tool supports real-time tracking, meaning users can quickly identify emerging stories or brand mentions, enabling timely responses. Users can set up keyword-based alerts and receive automatic updates on relevant coverage.

The monitoring dashboard provides intuitive visualization, including metrics like reach, sentiment analysis, share of voice, and coverage comparisons against competitors. Coverage reports can be easily generated and customized, providing PR professionals with insights to evaluate the success and impact of their campaigns.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Multi-channel media monitoring including podcasts
• Daily coverage reports and real-time alerts
• Sentiment analysis and impact scoring

Determ (formerly Mediatoolkit)

Determ (formerly known as Mediatoolkit) is an AI-powered online media monitoring platform that provides real-time insights into what’s being said about your brand, competitors, or industry​. 

It’s essentially a specialized tool for tracking online media and social conversations. Determ allows you to monitor keywords across over 100 million online sources in any language, aggregating all your mentions into a single feed for analysis​. 

With its AI assistant “Synthia” and smart alerts, Determ aims to help PR and marketing teams make faster, data-driven decisions based on media trends.

Overview of channels monitored

Key features:

• Immediate alerts for online and social mentions
• AI-assisted trend summaries
• Multilingual media monitoring

Propel

Propel is a newer PR software platform that focuses on PR workflow and relationship management (often termed a “PRM”). It combines a media database, outreach tools, and tracking in one system. In practice, Propel is like a PR-specific CRM: you can find journalists (Propel offers a database of over 1 million contacts​), pitch them directly from your email, and then monitor the results of those pitches.

Alongside its pitching tools, Propel includes a built-in media monitoring module so you can see the outcome of your PR efforts. It monitors over 100 million online sources (news sites, blogs, forums) every day for your chosen keywords​. 

It also offers social listening across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (tracking 1 billion+ social accounts) so you can catch social media mentions of your brand or campaign​. Propel is notable for covering some emerging channels as well – for instance, it touts podcast monitoring, scanning 25,000+ podcasts for mentions of your keywords​. 

Broadcast monitoring is included too, with the ability to track TV and radio mentions and even play the clip within minutes of airing.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Unified PR pitching and coverage tracking
• Covers online, social, broadcast, and podcasts
• Easy-to-use dashboards with AI insights

Vuelio

Vuelio is a PR and communications software suite popular in the UK and Europe. It offers an extensive media database, press release distribution, media monitoring, and even public affairs tools in one platform.

Vuelio includes a built-in media monitoring service that tracks a broad range of media for mentions of your brand or keywords. This covers online news, print publications, and broadcast in the UK and beyond. Users have noted that Vuelio’s monitoring “misses nothing” in their market – it’s very thorough at capturing coverage, even from smaller regional outlets​. 

The platform provides daily email alerts with coverage summaries, which is handy for staying on top of news without logging in​. 

Vuelio’s monitoring dashboard will show you the volume of mentions, top sources, and allows you to drill into each piece of coverage. It may not have the real-time social media firehose of a dedicated listening tool, but for traditional press and online news, it’s robust. The service can also integrate licensed content (like print scans and broadcast clips) – often as an add-on – so you can see everything in one feed.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Thorough UK media monitoring (online, print, broadcast)
• Automated daily coverage emails
• Integrated print and broadcast clips

Prezly

Prezly is a PR software platform that is particularly known for its storytelling and newsroom capabilities. It functions as a PR CRM and publishing tool – allowing teams to manage their media contacts, create and distribute beautiful press releases or stories, and keep track of engagement.

Prezly introduced a built-in media monitoring solution in recent years to round out its offering​. This feature allows Prezly users to track online news coverage of their brand and log those mentions under “Coverage” in the platform​.

In practice, you set up keywords (like your brand name or campaign keywords) in Prezly’s monitoring settings, and the system will fetch relevant news articles from a database of 200k+ online news sources across 150+ countries​. 

Prezly’s monitoring is more basic compared to dedicated tools: it's primarily focused on online news mentions. It does not natively include social media listening or advanced analytics on coverage (aside from listing the outlet, date, and providing a link/clip). The philosophy is to give PR users a simple way to track and report on earned media outcomes without needing a separate monitoring subscription.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Simple global online news tracking
• Easy integration with PR campaigns
• Quick sharing of coverage results

Critical Mention

Critical Mention is an advanced, real-time media monitoring platform specifically built for PR professionals who need comprehensive tracking across multiple media channels. 

It integrates coverage from television, radio, online news, podcasts, print, and social media into a single, easy-to-use platform. Critical Mention helps PR teams stay informed about their brand's presence, respond quickly to coverage, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

It provides instant keyword-based alerts, advanced sentiment analysis, and customizable analytics dashboards that allow PR professionals to track media coverage, understand audience reactions, and swiftly respond to emerging trends or crises.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Real-time TV and radio monitoring
• Combined coverage (online, social, broadcast)
• Easy sharing of broadcast clips

Mention

Mention is a user-friendly media monitoring tool designed for real-time tracking of brand mentions across social media, websites, news outlets, blogs, and forums. It helps businesses of all sizes keep track of their digital footprint, analyze sentiment around their brands, and manage their reputation online efficiently.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Real-time online and social alerts
• Influencer identification from mentions
• Simple, team-friendly monitoring dashboard

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a leading consumer intelligence and media monitoring platform focused on analyzing large-scale social media and web conversations. It helps PR professionals uncover valuable insights about brand perception, consumer sentiment, competitive positioning, and market trends.

Brandwatch provides sophisticated monitoring across social media platforms, blogs, forums, news sites, and reviews, enabling detailed consumer sentiment analysis and influence tracking.

Its advanced analytics offer real-time sentiment detection, deep topic analysis, demographic insights, and customizable dashboards. Brandwatch also supports historical data analysis, allowing teams to measure performance over time and inform strategic decision-making.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• In-depth social and online monitoring
• Advanced sentiment and trend analysis
• AI-driven crisis and trend alerts

Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a powerful media monitoring and social listening platform designed to help PR professionals manage brand reputation and gain strategic insights. It tracks real-time conversations across social media, online news, print, broadcast, blogs, and forums, providing advanced analytics to assess the effectiveness and impact of PR activities.

Talkwalker offers robust, real-time monitoring across online, social media, print, broadcast (TV & radio), and even image and video analysis. It excels in sentiment analysis, trend detection, and predictive analytics.

Talkwalker’s dashboards provide visualized data on reach, engagement, share of voice, and brand sentiment. It uniquely offers AI-powered visual insights like logo recognition, helping brands track their presence beyond traditional text-based mentions.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Real-time multi-channel global monitoring
• Visual monitoring (logo/image/video detection)
• Predictive alerts for emerging trends or crises

What to consider when choosing a media monitoring service

Navigating the vast landscape of media tracking solutions can be daunting. 

With so many options offering similar functionality, it's easy to get lost. To help you make the right choice, we recommend considering the following:

All-in-one PR tools vs media monitoring tools

Most media monitoring software is not limited to just tracking media coverage and offer a complete suite of tools for PR professionals. These all-in-one PR platforms offer other features such as a media database, PR reporting, press release creation and distribution, and more.

If you’re not solely looking for a tool that offers media monitoring, it’s worth having a look at what other features are available as part of the whole tool and how they compare to other platforms.

Key points:

• Clarifying your needs: Do you require a comprehensive PR suite, or is a dedicated media monitoring tool sufficient?
• Cost-benefit analysis: All-in-one platforms typically cost more upfront but might be more economical than subscribing to multiple specialized tools.
• Feature overlap: evaluate whether additional features genuinely enhance your workflow or create unnecessary complexity and cost.

Available channels

Media monitoring tools typically track:

• Online: News sites, blogs, forums, and reviews.
• Social Media: Platforms such as Instagram, X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, and niche platforms.
• Print: Newspapers, magazines.
• Broadcast: Television and radio.

Most tools will track mentions from similar sources and include online and social mentions.

More advanced software can cover niche social media platforms, or traditional channels such as print, TV, and radio.

Additionally, the quality of these mentions may differ from tool to tool. If a particular channel is important for you, check with the provider to understand if there any limitations.

Free trial

Some media monitoring tools offer the chance to try out the software first-hand with a trial. The free version will likely be limited, but it’s still a great way to try out the service, check the quality of the mentions, and see if it fits your needs before you commit to a paid subscription.

Enrichment data

If you’re tracking online mentions, it’s worth checking the quality of the enrichment data. This will allow you to track metrics such as estimated reach, domain authority, and reach, to assess the importance of your mentions.

For example, Prowly uses Semrush data, a leading data provider to accurately estimate the reach of online mentions.

Customization and query flexibility

Effective monitoring depends significantly on precise search queries. Broad or inaccurate queries can lead to irrelevant results or missed critical mentions. Ensure the tool provides adequate customization options, including:

• Advanced search logic: Utilize Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and parentheses to fine-tune queries.
• Keyword inclusion/exclusion: Easily add relevant keywords and exclude irrelevant terms.
• Real-time query adjustments: Quickly adapt queries to evolving campaign requirements or trends.

💡 Learn how to create effective media monitoring queries from this article based on real-life examples.

Managing and prioritizing results

If you're tracking a popular brand or keyword then the number of your results could be a lot.Efficient workflow management capabilities help prevent information overload. Consider features like:

• Tier assignment: Prioritize important mentions.
• Favorites and tagging: Organize mentions quickly for future reference.

Insights and customizable dashboards

Quick access to insightful data is crucial for real-time decision-making and client communications. Look for:

• Interactive dashboards: Customizable dashboards for campaigns, competitors, or specific trends.
• Advanced visualization: Graphs, timelines, and widgets (e.g., share of voice with filter options) to enhance data presentation and demonstrate the value of your work effectively.

Automated stakeholder communication

Regular updates to stakeholders are essential. Evaluate tools that provide:

• Customized mention digests: Daily, weekly, or monthly emails tailored to stakeholders’ specific interests, avoiding information overload.
• AI-generated coverage summaries: Automatically create concise summaries to save analysis time.

Custom and shareable reports

The ability to generate professional, shareable reports is invaluable. Ensure the platform supports:

• Report customization: Create reports per campaign, topic, or timeframe, with flexible formatting (XLS, PPT, etc.).
• Ease of sharing: Easily share reports via links with customized visuals and data representation.

Pricing and subscription length

Your budget will be one of the key factors in choosing the right software. Media monitoring tools can range from $500/yr to over $10,000/yr. This will depend on the channels available and included features.

The more sophisticated the software, the more you’ll have to pay, so it’s important to figure out your requirements beforehand—if you need a basic monitoring tool or a powerful all-in-one PR platform.

This is also true across different plans for the same software. All tools offer multiple plans, which can greatly differ in price and features.

Some questions worth asking yourself include:

• The number of clients and keywords you’ll need to monitor
• The total number of channels you’ll want to monitor - do you need coverage for only media outlets, or also social media?
• The number of users

Unfortunately, many tools do not publicly disclose their pricing, requiring that you sign up for a demo to get a quote. It’s possible to find estimates online of how much each tool costs, although this may greatly differ based on your requirements.

Last but not least, while most tools require yearly plans, some provide monthly subscriptions as well. These will be more expensive, with the benefit of not having to commit to an entire year.

User experience and navigation

Evaluate the platform’s usability thoroughly:

• Intuitive design: Simple navigation accelerates user adoption and ensures ongoing team engagement.
• Performance: The platform should perform swiftly and reliably, ensuring maximum productivity and utilization.

Customer support responsiveness

Strong customer support is critical, especially during initial setup and ongoing usage:

• Initial query setup assistance: Access to dedicated support simplifies complex query building.
• Responsive ongoing support: Prompt assistance in case of missed coverage or technical issues ensures uninterrupted monitoring and maximum tool effectiveness.

By carefully weighing these criteria, you'll select a media monitoring tool best suited to your

Partnerships and data providers

Many media monitoring tools do not gather all of the mentions by themselves but rely on partnerships or data providers to fill in the gaps for certain channels.

If a particular channel is of importance to you, find out where the mentions are sourced from.

As an example, most media monitoring tools have TV mentions through the same provider, TVEyes.

Paywalls

An increasing number of online news outlets contain paywalls, requiring a subscription to read articles. These can cause online mentions to be missed or displayed incorrectly.

Some media monitoring tools are able to bypass these paywalls.

This information may not always be provided on the website and is worth inquiring about during a demo call.

Time to pick the right software

The right tool can help you stay ahead of the conversation, measure the impact of your campaigns, and make data-driven decisions. Whether you’re managing a Public Relations of a global brand or a growing business, finding a tool that fits your specific needs and budget is key.

If you're looking for a solution that offers powerful media monitoring combined with intuitive PR tools, consider exploring Prowly's PR software. With features designed to streamline your workflow and maximize your media efforts, it’s a great choice for professionals who want to stay ahead in the competitive PR landscape.

Try Prowly today and discover how it can transform your media monitoring and PR efforts.

The post The Best 13 Media Monitoring Services for PR (2025 Buyer's Guide) appeared first on Prowly.

Whether you work at a PR or marketing agency, run your own business, or are a public figure, media monitoring can give you an edge over your competitors and allow you to be one step ahead of everyone else. The key is knowing how to do media monitoring effectively to get the most precise results and information you need.

It’s time to analyze all the business opportunities, past, current, and future trends, as well as emerging crises to take charge of your media presence and reputation. Let’s take a look at how to productively maneuver through media monitoring.

Who benefits from media monitoring?

Media monitoring isn't just for massive corporations. A wide range of organizations can leverage its power to gain valuable insights:

• Startups and SMEs: Track brand mentions, understand customer sentiment, and identify growth opportunities.
• Large Businesses: Monitor brand reputation, analyze competitor strategies, and manage public relations effectively.
• Advocacy Groups, Associations, and Non-Profits: Gauge public perception of your cause, track campaign effectiveness, and engage with supporters.
• Government and Public Administration: Stay informed about public opinion, identify emerging issues, and improve communication strategies.
• PR and Communications Agencies: Deliver comprehensive media analysis to clients, measure campaign impact, and identify newsworthy angles.

Why monitor the media?

Media monitoring is not just nice to have—it is a necessity. 

You need to know who’s talking and what they’re saying about your or your client’s brand. This is not the only advantage, though. The importance of media monitoring goes far beyond monitoring your brand or online discussions.

Here are some examples of why it's crucial to monitor the media:

• Reputation management and crisis prevention
• Measuring brand sentiment
• Measuring PR efforts
• Competitive intelligence
• Market research

Reputation management

A single negative news story, viral social media post, or scathing online review can have a devastating impact on your brand, affecting sales, customer loyalty, and even your ability to attract and retain talent.  

This is where media monitoring becomes absolutely crucial for reputation management, whether it’s identifying potential threats or protecting your brand from misinformation

Examples of keywords to monitor:

• Your organization’s name
• Your brand
• Key people
• Product names
• Related hashtags

Real-World Example: Imagine a food company facing a product recall. Media monitoring would alert them to mentions of the recall, consumer complaints, and any related health concerns. This allows them to respond quickly, communicate transparently, and manage the narrative to minimize damage to their reputation.

Brand sentiment

Brand sentiment is how an individual or a group of people feel about your brand, product, services, and overall offer.

Media monitoring helps you track brand sentiment – whether it's positive, negative, or neutral – across various media channels. This data can inform your marketing strategies, product development, and customer service efforts.

Brand sentiment analysis allows businesses to track the overall health of their brand and take action if things go south.

By measuring and analyzing brand sentiment, you can examine how the general public perceives your brand and use this information to direct your sales, marketing and product efforts.

Examples of keywords to monitor:

• Your brand
• Product names
• Your competitors (to use as a benchmark)

Measuring PR Efforts

Public relations efforts aim to shape public perception, build brand awareness, and drive positive engagement. To understand the effectiveness of these initiatives, media monitoring is indispensable. It provides concrete data to analyze the impact of PR campaigns, demonstrate ROI, and refine future strategies.

By tracking media coverage, you can determine if your key messages are resonating, identify which media outlets are most influential, and measure the overall reach of your PR activities. This data allows you to prove the value of your PR efforts and make data-driven decisions.

Examples of keywords to monitor:

• Campaign-specific hashtags
• Press release headlines and key phrases
• Spokesperson names
• Targeted media outlets
• Industry-relevant publications
• Specific event names

Real-World Example: A tech company launches a new product with a targeted PR campaign. They monitor media coverage to track mentions of the product's key features, the tone of the articles, and the reach of the campaign. They also track social media engagement with campaign-specific hashtags. This data allows them to measure the success of the campaign, identify which media outlets were most effective in reaching their target audience, and demonstrate the value of their PR investment to stakeholders. Further more, they can see if the key messages they wanted to push out were the messages that were actually received.

Market research

Staying informed about market trends and customer preferences is crucial for staying competitive.

Media monitoring can provide valuable insights into what consumers are talking about, what their needs and pain points are. This information can help you identify new opportunities, develop innovative products, and improve your marketing strategies.

Examples of keywords to monitor:

• Industry keywords
• Your competitors
• Emerging trends

Real-World Example: A beauty company monitors social media discussions about skincare. They notice a growing interest in natural and organic products. This insight can inform their product development strategy and lead them to create a new line of organic skincare products.

Competitive intelligence

Keeping tabs on your competitors is essential for staying ahead of the curve. Media monitoring allows you to track their activities, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and learn from their successes and failures. This information can help you refine your own strategies and gain a competitive edge.

Examples of keywords to monitor:
Your competitors’ brands
Your competitors’ products
Competitors’ marketing campaigns

Real-World Example: A car manufacturer monitors media coverage of its competitors' new models. They analyze the features that are being highlighted by reviewers and the customer feedback on those features. This information can help them identify areas where they can improve their own products.

Where to look for media mentions?

Nowadays, the number of places where your brand can be mentioned in the media is almost endless.

Where once mentions were confined to print and broadcast media, the internet has opened up a plethora of online platforms—news sites, blogs, social media, and forums—where anyone can discuss your brand.

To ensure you don't miss anything important, you need to track these core channels:

• Online news and blogs
• Social media
• Discussions and communities
• Broadcast
• Print
• Podcasts

Let's dive deeper into each of them to understand their specific roles and differences.

Online news and blogs

A recent report shows online media has overtaken TV as the top news source in the UK.

Often divided into tiers, online news can include anything from top-tier national publications to industry-specific publications, blogs, and community-focused local news sites.

Although there’s no official number of tiers, they can be divided into the following groups:

• Tier 1 (Top-Tier): Broad reach, high credibility, and significant influence; includes major national and international news outlets. Examples: CNN, Forbes
• Tier 2 (Mid-Tier): Focused audience or regional reach; includes industry publications and established online magazines, valuable for targeted demographics. Examples: The Boston Globe, Healthcare IT News
• Tier 3 (Lower-Tier): Niche or local audiences; includes blogs and community publications, important for localized or highly specific marketing. Examples: Blogs, local news, niche industry publications

When monitoring the media, tracking all publications, especially the smaller ones is crucial. Although they have less traffic, their relevant audiences can be more impactful than mentions in tier-1 publications.

SEO and backlinks

The benefits of being mentioned on online news sites go beyond extra visibility and trust for your brand. Backlinks from topically related websites—especially those with a strong domain authority—can increase your rankings in search engines and, as a result, boost traffic to your website.

When checking your mentions for SEO, look at the following metrics:

• The domain authority of the website where you’re mentioned
• The estimated reach of the article
• If the mention contains a backlink to your website

A mention doesn’t always guarantee a link back to your site. Media monitoring tools like Prowly, can help you find unlinked mentions and convert them into valuable backlinks.

Don’t forget the comment section

Some news sites—especially smaller ones—and blogs contain a comment section, which can hide additional mentions of your brand. Don’t forget about these, especially since they can include unmoderated negative comments that everyone else can see. 

Brand mentions here can be useful and offer real insights into what your consumer base thinks, regardless of the tone of the article.

Social media

Monitoring social media platforms is one of the most important business analytics processes. To stay informed about your audience and listen in to what they have to say about you, it’s crucial to monitor the top platforms.

• X (formally Twitter)
• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok

An effective media monitoring tool will help you filter information in the posts, replies, and even comments from other users. Once you get that information, you can then gather insights from the reactions and sentiments your audience has about you, a brand, or a campaign. 

Discussions and communities

Social media platforms and comment sections aren’t the only places where people can express their opinions about your brand.

Discussion sites, forums, and communities can be a goldmine for media mentions. And with Google preferring user-generated content recently, it’s possible for mentions on forums to get indexed in search results—and stay there for everyone to see.

Depending on your industry and field of expertise, there are several online communities to monitor. These include:

• Reddit,
• Quora,
• Stack Overflow,
• Steam,
• and many more.

Finding online forums and communities may not be the easiest thing to do if you have a niche business, but that’s why tools like daily media monitoring are priceless. Not only will you know what they are saying about you, you will also be able to locate your target audience and which online networks they frequent the most.

Print

Although most newspapers, magazines, and publications are readily available online, it is still worth monitoring who is saying what about you offline.

Collecting clippings manually is a daunting task, especially since most print media come out every single day. That’s when a print media monitoring takes all that work off your hands.

Here's the Practical Guide to PR Clippings for your PR agency if you'd like to delve a bit deeper into the topic.

Broadcast

We live in a digital age, but most people still get their latest news by watching television.

If your business or brand depends on TV or radio, those are the channels you should be monitoring through broadcast monitoring as well.

Once you have gathered all the data from media monitoring, what's next? If you're looking for the best way to present the data, you need to create a media report.

What information should I monitor?

Now that you know where to look, it’s time to evaluate what information you should be monitoring exactly. Having all the data is the first step, but knowing what to do with it is an art in itself.  

There are tons of different ways on how to do media monitoring. Most of the time, these depend on what you are trying to accomplish and your respective end goal. 

Are you monitoring the newest campaign and watching reactions and the sentiment your audience has towards it? Are you trying to gain more in-depth knowledge about the competitors you have in a particular niche industry? Or maybe you simply want to measure the strength of your current strategies against previous approaches? 

To use media monitoring effectively, you should ask yourself what are your goals and do they align with your KPIs or other relevant objectives.

A media monitoring software can help you better understand your target audience, evaluate your strategies, analyze your brand perception and reputation, identify potential influencers and journalists you’d wish to contact, and much more.

Brand mentions

By looking at who is mentioning your brand and where, you can control brand awareness and adjust your PR & marketing strategy. Knowing where your brand is mentioned can help you evaluate who your target audience is, what people are saying about your brand, and even prevent an upcoming crisis. 

This method is also relevant for keeping tabs on your own name, company, or even a particular campaign. Not all media monitoring tools are created equal, so make sure to pick one that also shows historical data to examine previous brand mentions as well.

Competitors

Monitoring your own performance and brand is important, but knowing what your competitors are up to is more than just an essential practice you should be implementing in your strategy if you haven’t already. 

Taking a closer look at their successes and failures can help you anticipate their next move, adjust your own strategy and gather valuable insights on your own performance against others in your respective industry. 

If you know how to do media monitoring well, you can take advantage of their shortcomings and be one step ahead. These are just a few media monitoring tips you can use for competitor analysis:

• Keep an eye on the social platforms they use
• Track their backlinks to create a potential outreach list for yourself
• Find influencers they’re working with
• Set up alerts for their new mentions
• Analyze sentiment in comments and reviews

P.S. For those searching for the best tools for competitor analysis, check out this article.

Print mentions

In the era of digital PR, we tend to forget that press coverage is still important. And that it doesn't have to be searched for manually.

Without print monitoring tools, you may miss out on valuable insights regarding your brand's presence, sentiment, and competitors' activities within print media, hindering your informed decision-making.

Add print publications to digital media monitoring to:

• Gain instant access to several global, national, regional, and local newspapers, trade publications, consumer magazines, and business journals.
• Track mentions of your brand, your competitors, and industry trends across domestic and international print and paywalled outlets.
• Analyze insights consolidated into a single, user-friendly dashboard.
• Make sure you have access to diverse sources to ensure you track coverage everywhere it appears.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your print media investments and campaign ROI by quantifying the impact of your brand's mentions and media coverage using advanced filters.

PRO TIP: If you work in the UK market, most online and print outlets are hard to monitor because of the NLA license. Prowly monitoring gives you access to tracking mentions in them.

With Prowly you can easily analyze your results by using customisable dashboards. You will also find new filters inside, which makes analyzing the impact of your campaigns easier.

Broadcast: TV, radio and podcasts

Broadcast monitoring lets you better understand the media landscape by analyzing your media presence across TV, over the Radio, and in podcasts on both local and global scales.

Imagine having the ability to effortlessly monitor mentions in real-time, gaining valuable insights into how your brand is being discussed across various media channels. With the advanced query building and filtering options, you can customize your searches to capture exactly what you need.

At Prowly, you can create easy-to-use dashboards that make it simple to visualize your media data.

Monitoring your mentions in broadcasts lets you:

👉🏼 Gain more comprehensive coverage data
Track mentions across various regions including the US, Canada, and the UK, ensuring you capture relevant broadcast content for your market.

👉🏼 Get detailed insights about your media presence
Obtain valuable metrics such as estimated reach, publicity value, and sentiment analysis to understand the impact of your media presence.

👉🏼 Analyze all media sources in one tool
Get access to a unified tool that integrates the monitoring of all media types.

If you're interested in a customized plan that aligns with your specific goals, or if you want to add print and broadcast monitoring to your toolkit, simply provide your contact information, and we'll handle the rest.

Suppliers and vendors

Does your or your client’s business depend on external providers? Monitoring the market is important and will help you determine whether suppliers and vendors’ services will be restricted by ongoing restrictions, delivery accidents, or even politics.

It doesn’t really matter if your products are physical or digital. The latter can also be affected by, for example, viruses or bugs. Monitor relevant keywords to know how these sudden changes may impact you or your client and subsequently draft an impromptu response strategy.

Important keywords

Depending on your industry and marketing targets, the bottom line is to keep an eye on everything that might directly or indirectly affect your brand or company. Aside from monitoring the name of your own brand, tracking social media and your competition, there are other powerful ways on how to do media monitoring and get the most out of the tool.

Here are a few examples when playing around with different keywords that might be useful:

1. You’re in the real estate business

Look up keywords such as “apartments New York”, “rent laws 2023”, “luxury real estate Los Angeles”, “worst neighborhoods Connecticut”. These might help you take your business to the next level and spot potential opportunities for earned media coverage. 

2. You run a non-profit

Although the keywords you choose have to be related to your specific organization, some of the words and phrases you may be interested in are “tech volunteer”, “healthcare donations”, “goodwill ambassadors” or even the names of major donors and popular journalists that often cover charity and non-profit stories.

3. You do PR for food industries

Depending on the exact branch, you might want to check out keywords such as “food trends 2023”, “food inflation”, “sugar free beverages” and many others.

You get the idea.

Backlinks

I’m sure you’ve heard about the importance of digital PR and how it’s shaping today’s PR industry. Having high-quality, relevant backlinks can boost your online visibility and reputation.

Measuring the number and quality of backlinks can help you acquire new customers and more business. If you have valuable backlinks, these can help skyrocket your position in Google’s results. More importantly, you can always track your competitors’ backlinks as well and see where to find backlink opportunities. 

Media monitoring – tips & best practices 

Knowing how to do media monitoring effectively is the most important aspect of using the tool itself. Here are a few tips you should implement in your strategy:

Narrow down your search

You will save hours on top of hours by getting the most relevant information you need.

For example, if you run an e-commerce business that specializes in shoes, don’t waste time on all mentions that have the “shoes” keyword. 

This tip may be a no-brainer for many PR professionals, but it’s crucial not to get sidetracked by all the possibilities media monitoring has to offer. To get the most precise results, use as many filters as you can. 

Watch out for spelling and context

This is perhaps one of the simplest media monitoring tips but happens so often it’s definitely worth highlighting. There are tons of posts on social media that might be talking about you or your brand, but what if they are misspelled? You have no way of finding them.

For example, if your name is “Ana”, try to search for “Anna”, “Anne” or “Ann” as well.

Additionally, check the context of the keyword you’re looking for. While “Apple” is a brand, it’s also a fruit or a name. To get the most optimal results, don’t forget to pick a specific keyword type to match what you’re looking for.

Use alerts to avoid missing opportunities

Whether you’re interested in how well your new campaign or product is performing, it’s smart to stay up to date on any new mentions. A quality media monitoring service should be able to alert you right in your mailbox when something interesting happens.

If you want to save time on reporting your progress, use a tool that schedules daily, weekly, and monthly alerts with AI coverage summaries.

Setting up alerts is crucial to monitor abnormal activity on any keywords, brands, or competitors you want to track. It’s also useful in preventing an upcoming media crisis by receiving updates on a surge in bad sentiment alerts.

Take advantage of sentiment analysis

With a stellar media monitoring tool, you should be able to monitor the sentiment of any keywords and backlinks you’re after. Positive and negative sentiment can help you determine which one of your strategies works well and which developments you should act on immediately or readjust in the future.

Receiving lots of bad sentiment is a sight no PR professional wants to see, but there are ways you can use it in practice other than preventing a media crisis.

For each bad sentiment you found, you can implement a risk management practice and respond to all comments and negative reviews you received.

Organize your mentions

This is a crucial step that will save you a lot of time in the long run. While everyone has their own preference when it comes to organizing their work, there are many features a good media monitoring tool should offer to help you out.

Take your time to file all of your mentions and put them into separate projects. You should also be able to add mentions to clippings, tiers or sort them out by sentiment, country etc. It’s better to do it in the beginning and set yourself up for the future, rather than spend days on organizing mentions down the line.

Psst! Here's a list of the best social listening tools available on the market.

You can also learn all about using social monitoring for PR from The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations.

Conclusion

If you want to monitor media content the right way, it’s important to know how to do media monitoring well. The sooner you start monitoring yourself, your brand, or your competitors, the sooner you will be able to gather all insights and use them for your PR and marketing campaigns, new business opportunities, risk management, and much more.

Once you're at it, you might want to check what Prowly has to offer. It's an all-in-one workflow automation solution for PR professionals that supports users in media monitoring, finding the right media contacts, and managing email pitches, just to name a few.

Cover photo by Markus Winkler

The post How to Do Media Monitoring: Tips & Best Practices appeared first on Prowly.

1. By how often you were too late to jump on an opportunity for coverage. 
2. By how many times you had to act on a PR crisis after it had already gained traction. 
3. By how often your boss or stakeholders are unconvinced by your PR results and share of voice metrics.

Scoring high for all three? Don’t feel bad. Building precise queries, detecting crises, and applying PR metrics to business decisions might be some of the trickiest PR tasks. 

Unless you know the smart ways to use media monitoring to its fullest potential. All you need are a few convenient media monitoring features.

Read on and find out:

• How to winnow down monitoring results using keyword filtering
• How to extract strategic insights from raw monitoring data
• How to refine queries to get just the right mentions

The challenge: Information overflow in media monitoring

Everything is happening too fast. 

Especially in the media, a new important headline comes up every second of every day. And, as a PR pro, your job is to track all mentions that matter to your brand and boil them down to crucial insights, like trending topics, customer sentiment, and competitive intelligence.

No wonder you might feel overwhelmed. Collecting mentions usually means receiving loads of spam, and filtering through all that to get to the gist leads to information overload. It can take precious hours away from you–hours that could be spent building great public relations.

And in monitoring the media, timing is essential. You need those strategic insights ASAP to create timely pitches, plan relevant and targeted campaigns, track your progress, and report successes to stakeholders.

How can you arrive at actionable data faster? How do you turn chaos into clarity?

The solution: Smart media monitoring features

Prowly’s query builder has long had the function to search for any keyword or backlink. You can narrow down or expand your results by adding more criteria, like location and filters.

That’s all great, but what if there are still too many matches to analyze?

Prowly now allows you to create keyword-focused dashboards, alerts, digests, and notifications. And if your original query is too broad, you can edit it and refine your search.

To understand how all this works, we've prepared the four step-by-step instructions below. Here's how you introduce more precision into your monitoring workflow and get an accurate media overview.

4 ways to get more strategic with media monitoring

Read the theoretical scenarios below and learn how to conduct coverage analysis, build strategic dashboards, create focused mention alerts, and refine queries.

Scenario 1. Keyword-specific coverage analysis

Say, you want to conduct a social media sentiment analysis for your new product launch.

Your brand is an athleticwear company called lululemon and you’ve launched sustainable clothing packaging. You want to know how the launch is being perceived in social media and find ways to tie it in with the current online trends. 

You’ve created a basic brand query, “lululemon”.

Who should you monitor? 

In this particular case, you might want to focus on:

• News and journalists: how does mainstream media talk about your brand?
• Content creators: how are they presenting your product?
• The online community: how do the customers engage with the launch?

Which keywords should you filter mentions by? 

Think of social media trends and forms of content, like the following:

• News and journalists: "drop", "launch", "new leggings", "limited edition", "mystery box"
• Content creators: "review", "trying on", "haul", "unboxing", "ASMR", "rating", "honest", "thoughts"
• The online community: "duet", "stitch", "trend", "challenge", "viral", "FYP", "community"

How do you filter mentions by keywords in Prowly?

Prowly’s Media Monitoring gives you the option to create a query focused on a keyword or backlink.

Each query you create has a separate page called Mention Browser, where you can see all results and filter through them by sentiment, location, post engagement, and more.

One of the most precise filters is Keywords. Here’s how you’d use this filter in your Lululemon project:

1. Go to the “Lululemon” query Mention Browser in Media Monitoring.
2. Among the filters on the left, choose “Source”.
3. Select X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube (available for Pro plan users only).
4. Next, choose the filter “Keywords”, type in the keyword, and press enter.
5. Your mention browser now only shows the mentions for this keyword.

What’s the strategic benefit?

Using keywords in the mention browser helps quickly evaluate the social media sentiment for your product launch. 

You could potentially find new ways and channels for promoting the brand, like the most engaging unboxing format, micro-influencers who organically mention lululemon’s sustainability, or a new customer community emerging on Instagram, who call themselves “the lulu crew”.

Equipped with these insights, you get a detailed understanding of how the launch has been going and what to do next.

Scenario 2. Building strategic dashboards

You and your stakeholders want to understand the media narrative about the activewear category and how lululemon's competitors are positioned in this narrative. You need visual help, so you’re building a strategic dashboard.

A Prowly dashboard consists of widgets with your chosen metrics. You decide whether you want them in the form of bar charts, columns, donut graphs, etc.

You can add as many widgets as you want to see the full picture.

How do you create a strategic dashboard in Prowly?

When considering your brand presence against competitors, you might be asking yourself the following questions:

• What are the top online media outlets covering this product category?
• Which messages and keywords are gaining traction?
• Where are the gaps in my competitors' storytelling? Which audiences are they failing to own? 

To analyze all this, it's best to create a query that monitors your product category and build a strategic dashboard. Here's how you do that:

1. Create a query for the name of your product category, “activewear”.
2. Name the dashboard for this query: “Mentions about activewear in US media”.
3. Add widgets with quality insights, like a "Top mentions" list sorted by authority score.
4. In the "Top mentions" widget, under “Filter results”, click “Article keywords”.
5. Type in the competitor's name, press enter, and save.

Your dashboard now shows a top mentions list for this competitor.

Here's what an example of a strategic dashboard looks like:

Which keywords should you filter widgets by?

Create as many widgets as you want, with any keywords that will help you understand your brand presence and the competitive landscape:

• What type of content is created about the product? Use “product review”, “recommend”, or “tried”
• How does product perception differ between countries? Pay attention to linguistic differences, e.g. "shorts" (US) or "briefs" (UK)
• Do people like the product varieties? For example, you can use product lines, like “yoga", "workout", or "hiking"

What’s the strategic benefit?

Visual aids are especially helpful in grasping elusive metrics like brand presence. 

Building dashboards with keyword-specific charts and graphs helps you find the current media narratives about your product category. You may also track down the media outlets and journalists who cover it, and start brainstorming story angles for them.

Found any specific customer frustrations or pain points? Address them in your press release or pitch. Found interesting insights about the activewear market? Share them with marketing or the business team. 

Strategic media monitoring dashboards are a great way to gain actionable insights for the entire brand. By showing actual metrics, you prove your work’s value for the company.

Scenario 3. Creating precise alerts

Let’s say you’re launching a new Nestle product. Your goal is to set up alerts for crisis prevention.

Which aspects should you consider?

For a commercial food company, potential brand safety issues include:

• Product safety signals
• Packaging/quality issues
• Cultural sensitivity
• Distribution problems
• Customer service

Which keywords should you filter alerts by?

Consider which keywords would be the most telling:

• Product safety signals: “allergy”, “sick”, “ingredients”, “contains”, “expired”
• Packaging/quality issues: “damaged”, “crushed”, “mold”, “sealed”, “half full”
• Cultural sensitivity: “offensive”, “inappropriate”, “not okay”, “yikes”, “problematic”
• Distribution problems: “shipping”, “overpriced”, “scalping”, “sold out”, “delayed”
• Customer service: “no response”, “ghosted”, “ignored”, “dm’d”, “refund”, “problem”

How do you filter alerts by keywords in Prowly?

1. Go to Media Monitoring projects in the app.
2. Go to “Email notifications,” click "Create email notification," and choose "Alert".
3. Choose the alert type and select one or more queries for the alert.
4. Set the internal and external notification name and make sure the AI analysis is on.
5. Add internal and/or external recipients and use the "Add filters" option to add keywords, sources, etc.

What’s the strategic benefit?

There are so many early warning signals you can catch onto before a small issue becomes a full-blown crisis. No more waiting around until negative press goes viral.

With ad hoc alerts and recurring digests for specific keywords, you can track and address your food brand’s issues like unclear allergen labeling, unauthorized sellers, a socially unacceptable design element, distribution problems, or quality control issues at a specific retail location. All ahead of time.

Scenario 4. Editing existing queries

Prowly’s query builder is the perfect tool for scrutinizing your media mentions. But anyone who’s ever created a monitoring query knows it needs revisions and refinements over time.

With the new edit function, you can now redo your existing queries and create a more focused search each time.

How do you edit media monitoring queries in Prowly?

Based on the example of your lululemon product launch:

1. Go to the “nestle” query in Media Monitoring projects.
2. Click on "Settings" and “Edit query” to make changes to your query.
3. Preview the new matches to make sure your edits are helpful.
4. If you’re sure, save the changes.

Important notice: you have to be absolutely certain your refinements are necessary. Editing your query means getting new results, and new results lower your monitoring limits, just like a new query would.

Best practices for query maintenance

To make sure editing your query is a good idea, check the preview in the query builder. If your matches are more precise than before, you’ve done a good job and you can save the new query. 

What do more precise matches mean? In the case of your lululemon search, this means results that only show news, posts, and reviews about the brand and its products, and not e.g. special promotions or reselling deals.

Remember to pay attention to your mention limits.

You can make changes to any part of the query, including type, filters, keywords, and sources. Keep in mind there are time limitations for the new results:

• Basic plan: 30 days
• Pro plan: 90 days for online mentions, 30 days for social media
• Enterprise plan: 1 year for online and print, 90 days for broadcast, 30 days for social media

What’s the strategic benefit?

Plain and simple–you get to change the monitoring search scope without losing your progress.

A lot can happen between setting up your first query and finishing up a campaign. Query editing gives you an option to revise your strategy.

Your Media Monitoring Health Check

So, what should your perfect media monitoring workflow look like? 

Here’s a handy 3-step action plan to examine and cure all your media monitoring problems:

The Media Monitoring Health Check will help you detect gaps and inefficiencies in your query-building, filtering, and alert-setting process. Use this workflow to build a structured, streamlined network of insights and avoid slowdowns in your next projects.

Closing thoughts

Monitoring the media doesn't have to be a painful, messy chore. The devil is in the workflow.

Smart queries and strategic dashboards transform media monitoring from a passive reporting tool into an active driver of business intelligence. There’s a universe of interesting metrics and insights in every search.

Information you find in media monitoring can help sales and product teams succeed. Tracking your brand trust, competitors, and market trends elevates your role from a PR pro to a strategic advisor.

The post No More Data Overload: 4 Ways to Gain Strategic Insights from Media Monitoring appeared first on Prowly.

In addition to simply keeping informed, with a comprehensive media monitoring solution you can finally leverage real data to shape strategies, manage your reputation, and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. This latest addition is thanks to our partnerships with the most credible service providers—LexisNexis and TVEyes.

Or learn about these topics first:

• Get mentions in print media and paywalled content
• Collect hits from TV and radio
• 3 problems this solution will help you solve
• New metrics for more sources
• New, tailored subscription plan

Get mentions in print media and paywalled content

Better tracking and better analysis of print media mentions. Thanks to the LexisNexis database, Prowly is now able to provide you with access to global, national, regional and local newspapers, trade publications, magazines, and business journals.

If you're looking for powerful print media monitoring tools to track and analyze press coverage effectively, Prowly has you covered.

As part of the print monitoring service, users can now track and access mentions in licensed online content, including paywalled articles. And you can monitor both print and digital mentions with up to one year of historical data.

Once you’ve got your results, you can refine your search based on outlet categories and date ranges for even more relevant outcomes.

Collect hits from TV and radio

Start monitoring your most-wanted mentions with Prowly. Now powered by TVEyes, we’re bringing you real-time tracking and analysis of television and radio content. 

With up to 90 days of historical data, users can filter results by various criteria, including premiere and repeat broadcasts, on a local or national scope, as well as channels of their choice.

3 problems this solution will help you solve

Adding a comprehensive media monitoring solution to your PR toolstack can help you easily overcome common industry challenges by providing you with complete coverage and a smoother workflow. 

#1: Significant gaps in coverage

🛑 Before:
Missing a critical insight from print media wasn’t all that difficult (hello oldschool manual clipping!), especially if you have many sources to track. This can greatly affect your ability to make informed decisions, where crucial mentions, trends, and sentiment can be easily overlooked, leading to gaps in understanding your own presence and overall performance.

✅ After:
You can get complete coverage across all media types, including online, social listening, print, and broadcast. By gathering more mentions, you can forget about the gaps in your strategy and start making well-informed decisions with confidence.

💡 P.S. To do clippings the new (=fast and effective) way, read our Practical Guide to Mastering PR Exposure.

#2: Using different tools for different sources

🛑 Before:
Handling multiple tools was inefficient and time-consuming. The constant need to switch between softwares, keep up with subscriptions, paying more and more, and finally, how time-consuming! It also meant analyzing mentions dozens of times, and generating more reports, which were directly leading to fragmented data and lower productivity.

✅ After:
Now, Prowly brings everything under one roof. So you can do all your monitoring and reporting in one single place. This helps you streamline your workflow, optimize campaigns, and monitor mentions more efficiently. 

#3: Difficulties operating in various regions

🛑 Before:
Oftentimes, media monitoring services worked in one region only. Therefore, if you operate in more than just one market, you probably needed more than one tool to do so. Couple that with challenges in getting localized insights and your over strategy might have always been a bit incomplete.

✅ After:
We now offer tailored localization packages so that all of our clients can monitor media coverage across all the different countries and regions of their choice. Whether it’s the US, Canada or global markets, pick whatever suits your needs. With this, you can manage broadcast monitoring on a global scale without hesitation.

New metrics for more sources

From now on, quantifying your PR results will be less of a challenge with dashboards that include proper print and broadcast metrics. All this lets you easily analyze even more data.

Print metrics

1️⃣ Create intuitive dashboards to analyze print mentions with metrics including top print articles based on outlet circulation, number of mentions, estimated reach, share of voice, and sentiment.

2️⃣ Then, use outlet categories as filters to analyze your data even deeper.

Broadcast metrics

To evaluate the effectiveness of TV and radio mentions, users will now be able to determine top broadcast clips over a particular data set, such as publicity value, estimated reach, share of voice, and sentiment.

In addition, you’ll always be able to filter results by TV scope (US only) and types of clips.

New, tailored subscription plan

To further cater to your individual preferences, we’ve introduced a new, special pricing plan that offers a diverse range of media intelligence tools. This plan is meticulously crafted to meet the needs of even the most demanding PR professionals, providing tailored access to our comprehensive services.

Find out more and get a personalized plan that fits your unique requirements.

We’re really excited about these new additions and hope you are too. By integrating the most credible data sources on the market and providing you with user-friendly analysis tools, we’re committed to helping PR professionals stay ahead.

The post Introducing New Sources with Print and Broadcast Monitoring appeared first on Prowly.