It’s important to remember that this PRtrax™ report dashboard, and optional PRN VR reporting, is/are not a “media monitoring” service to track media pick-ups, or “earned media” over time.
True media monitoring can cost $500/month and up to scour all print, online and broadcast media for mention of your news and provide clips. Neotrope/Send2Press offered this type of service as a paid option up until about 2010, when we determined that it was now more cost effective to spend that same funding on doing more press releases or fund social media targeting.
And, the main reason we discontinued such a paid service was the fact that nearly everything (except certain content behind pay-walls) does, in fact, show up in the main Google search engine at some point.
We then began promoting to our clients the option of learning to do “advanced” (“filtered”) searches with Google’s free advanced search options. We used to provide a tutorial on this, but Google now has a much better one (links below).
Custom Search Documentation
How To — Tracking Placements with Google Advanced Search: Rather than use an expensive “media monitoring service,” you can learn to do basic tracking of your news using custom/advanced searches with Google (e.g., my name + company name, but not company with similar name). It’s free and you can bookmark custom searches to re-visit at periodic intervals.
Be aware that doing searches strictly by “quoted headline” (refers to doing a search in Google for exact match) doesn’t always work well as many sites change the story headline from original press release. Also be aware Google now buries much of the duplicated “news clone” content as not being relevant in search results since it’s all copies of the originating site(s) content. (When doing quoted headline searches you often need to go a few pages in, scroll to bottom and select the “show duplicates” option.)
Use the buttons below to learn to use these tools on Google’s own help portal. Send2Press does not provide support in learning to use these tools.
Advanced Search
Narrow down search results for complex searches by using the Advanced Search page. For example, you can find sites updated in the last 24 hours or images that are in black and white.
Learn more on Google
Refine web searches
You can use symbols or words in your search to make your search results more precise.
Learn more on Google
Example Search Code
Google News custom search
Replace the COMPANY+NAME and BRAND+TOPIC elements. Note that most news sites on the web do not appear in Google News; only content submitted and approved by Google News is included.
Edit text in this box and then copy paste in web browser window:
Google Search Engine
Example custom search in Google for a company brand and company name.
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