Create Monitoring Topics to Discover and Analyse Your Media Coverage

At the top of your Agility screen, hover over the Media Monitoring module and select New Search.

In the search fields begin by entering keywords that you want to monitor. Hit Enter once you have typed each word or phrase.  

In this search page, choose Text to do a standard text-only search that searches the text in the Headline, Lead, and/or Body of an article.  All these three elements are selected by default, but you can select Headline or Lead if you want to return only articles in which your keywords appear high up.

Choose Images, if you want to search coverage of a brands using Image Monitoring. This will generate see a list of articles with images featuring, for example, the brand’s logo, even if the brand isn’t explicitly mentioned within the text of the article. An example of an image search for "coca cola" is shown below.   

Learn more about the power of Image Monitoring here!

AND SEARCH: Enter keywords or phrases into "AND" section to retrieve content that must include all key words and phrases in this field; this typically narrows a search so that you retrieve very narrow results. In the screenshot below, the search will only return articles that contain ALL of the terms “Netflix”, “Hulu” or “Amazon Prime Video”. 

OR SEARCH: Enter keywords or phrases into the "OR" section to look for content that includes one, some or all key terms provided; these words or phrases generally expand a search to bring back more results. In the screenshot below, the search will return all articles that contain ANY one, two or all of the terms “Netflix”, “Hulu” or “Amazon Prime Video”. 

​COMBINING "AND" & "OR" SEARCHES: By using both the AND and OR fields you can search for terms that must be returned in combination with a choice of terms, one or all of which need to be present.
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​NOT SEARCH: Enter keywords or phrases into the "NOT" field to block keywords you don't want to have in your results. The screenshot below will return articles that contain “Netflix” and “Marvel” or “MCU” but will exclude any articles that mention “Disney” or "Apple".

You may also use a combination Keyword groups to further refine your search. Here's how.

"Expert Mode" can be used to manually create Boolean search strings to create your Topics, rather than using Agility's standard three fields of OR, AND and NOT fields.
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​Find out more about setting up topics using Boolean search string here.

Important Note: In both Simple and Expert mode, you can use certain specific special characters in your search. Special characters are non-alphanumeric characters that can be used in your searches. These are the plus sign (+), the ampersand (&), and the dash (-). These characters allow you to search keywords such as Disney+, Ben & Jerry's, or Coca-Cola, and receive the resulting mentions you expect to see.

On the right panel of your screen, refine your results by searching through some or all of the various Media Types, Sources, Regions, Languages, Sentiment and Case Sensitive Searching.  

Media Type - Depending on the media available in your subscription, you can refine your topic to monitor all or some media types. Learn more about subscription monitoring here.

For Broadcast and Social Media, you will most likely need to set up a subscription to generate the content and make it available to your topics. You can learn about subscriptions here.
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Sources and Regions - You can include or exclude any Contacts, Outlets, or Regions. Regions included or excluded may be countries, states/provinces, counties or cities.

If you have a group of contacts or outlets that you regularly wish to monitor, or wish to exclude from your coverage, rather than repeatedly enter them all into the source filter you can create a group and add them all with one click.

​Language - By default, all languages will be monitored. If you wish to change this, select the languages you require. (Note - You can translate media mentions into your chosen language).

​Sentiment - Applies to 25 languages.

​Case Sensitive Searching - You must have at least one upper case letter in your search. This looks for mentions of your keywords as it's written and particularly useful to find more relevant results for brands with common names.

Hide Similar Mentions - You can also select to Hide Similar Mentions at the point of creating or editing the topic search criteria, using the appropriate box in the bottom right-hand panel. There is more on this here.

Default Date Range Filter - This helps expand the duration of your ad-hoc searches if you want to look for searches beyond the past 24 hours. Please note this filter can not be saved and are applicable for ad-hoc searches only. When opened, all topic searches default to the past 24 hours but can be expanded in the results filter.

Once you have entered your search terms and applicable filters, you can click "Search" to look for results or "Save Search as Topic" and give your Topic a name. This will allow you to “lock in” the search for future monitoring of that topic.  You can also click "Reset All" if you want to reset your search and start from scratch.

Without leaving your search results page, you can quickly review your topic results metrics through some very attractive charts!  You can even interact with them to refine your search results or even download as images in various format types.

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​Coverage Over Time: Review, download, or even print your coverage metrics by clicking on the arrow icon to select various image and data formats and even print your graph!   

Get a clearer view of the metrics by zooming the graph in/out.  You can do so by interacting with the gray scroll bar. 

Sentiment and Media Type Breakdown: You also have the ability to quickly interact, download image and data, and even print the breakdown of Sentiment and Media type results. 

Click on any item to filter them out of your search results.  It will automatically show as [filtered] as seen in the screenshot below.  Click the item again to add it back in!

You have the option to further refine your search results through various filter options!  Click here to know more. 

A new search lets you search existing coverage without saving your search criteria.

A Topic saves your search so Agility can continue monitoring for new matching coverage automatically.

Yes.

You can edit your Topic at any time to update keywords, filters, media types, regions, languages, or other search settings.

Changes apply to future monitoring and may also affect the results returned when viewing the Topic.

No.

Topic results are generated automatically based on your search criteria, so individual mentions can't be manually deleted.

If an article is irrelevant, you can prevent similar coverage from appearing in future results by refining your Topic:

For print coverage, exclusions are typically achieved using keywords, since outlet URL exclusions don't apply.

This usually means your search is too broad.

To improve accuracy you can:

Yes.

Use the OR field to monitor multiple brands, products, executives, competitors, or keywords within a single Topic.

Combining these fields helps create more accurate Topics.

Yes.

Select Images instead of Text when creating your search to monitor articles containing images of your brand or logo, even if the brand isn't mentioned in the article text.

Yes.

Depending on your subscription, Topics can monitor multiple media types, including online, print, broadcast, podcasts, radio, and social media.

Some media types require an active subscription before content becomes available.

Broadcast and Social Media monitoring require active subscriptions.

If you don't have the necessary subscription, those mentions won't appear in your Topic results.

Yes.

Enable Case Sensitive Searching if you want Agility to distinguish between uppercase and lowercase versions of your keywords.

This is particularly useful for brands with common names.

Yes.

You can include or exclude specific outlets, contacts, countries, states, provinces, cities, and regions using the filters in the right-hand panel.

Yes.

If you regularly include or exclude the same outlets or contacts, you can create groups and reuse them across multiple Topics.

If Hide Similar Mentions is enabled, Agility groups similar articles together to reduce duplicate coverage.

You can change this setting when creating or editing your Topic.

Yes.

Switch to Expert Mode to build Topics using Boolean search strings instead of the standard keyword fields.

Yes.

You can use your Topic as a data source when creating Monitoring Reports or save selected mentions into Saved Coverage for reporting, briefings, and sharing.