Hunting for your own results
An executive starts each day by opening Google Alerts emails for six clients, the monitoring service dashboard, two trade sites that do not appear in monitoring, and a folder where colleagues drop links journalists sent them. She pastes each new piece into a spreadsheet: client, title, date, link, journalist. Syndicated copies of the same story appear in four places, so she has to decide whether they count as one piece or four.
At the end of the month a client finds a piece in a trade magazine that was never logged, because it only appeared in print and on a site behind a login. The client asks what else was missed. Nobody can say.
Why coverage slips through
No single source sees everything, so agencies stitch several together by hand, and the stitching is where things go missing.
| Source | What it catches | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| Media monitoring service | Most national and large online titles | Some trade, niche and paywalled sites |
| Google Alerts | Open web pages, quickly | Paywalls, print, much broadcast |
| Journalist tip-offs | Pieces you pitched | Anything they did not mention |
| Print cuttings service | Print titles | Online versions, timing |
| Client staff | Their own sector trade press | Anything they do not read |
Client names are also a problem. Short or common brand names produce floods of irrelevant results, and teams quietly stop checking alerts that are mostly noise.
What missed coverage costs
Missed coverage understates the agency's work in the one report the client reads closely. It also costs follow-up opportunities: a journalist who wrote a positive piece and got no thanks, no offer of an interview next time, no sharing of the piece by the client's own channels. And the daily hunt takes an hour or more of someone's morning that could go on pitching.
How we build one coverage feed
- We connect every source you use: the monitoring service's export or API where it offers one, alert emails, RSS feeds for trade titles, and a shared inbox or form for tip-offs.
- Each item is fetched and read, and duplicates and syndicated copies are grouped under one story with each place it appeared listed.
- Items are matched to clients using the client name, product names, spokesperson names and the release text, so a piece quoting your client's CEO is caught even if the company name is missing.
- Where a match is uncertain, such as a common brand name, the item goes to a short review queue instead of the client's list.
- Confirmed pieces are linked to the release or pitch that produced them where one exists, and to the journalist's record.
- Account teams get a daily digest per client in email or Teams, and can add print or broadcast pieces found elsewhere with a simple form.
We work within the terms of your monitoring service and the licences you hold. Where content cannot be stored, we store the reference and the link, not the text.
Mornings after the change
The executive opens a queue with eight uncertain items across all clients, confirms five and dismisses three. Everything else is already logged, grouped and matched. The digest tells the account director that a trade piece quoting the client's operations lead ran yesterday, and she thanks the journalist before lunch.
At month end, the coverage list is already complete, so building the client report starts from a finished list instead of a scramble.
Sound familiar?
- Someone spends the start of each day checking alerts and dashboards.
- Coverage is logged in a spreadsheet by hand.
- Syndicated copies are counted differently by different people.
- Clients sometimes find coverage the agency did not log.
- Alerts for common brand names are ignored because they are mostly noise.