If you review brand coverage, you need a shared meaning for the sources, dates and metrics in the report. These definitions cover brand and media monitoring. Entries identify metrics that OppAlerts does not provide.
Mention
A result naming the term you are watching for.
The word does a lot of work and hides a distinction that decides pricing across the category. Most monitoring products meter mentions returned rather than searches run, so the bill scales with how much is being said about you. Two companies on identical plans tracking identical terms can have very different experiences.
Alert
The standing instruction to watch for a term. An alert produces mentions; the two are counted separately.
Coverage
Published material about a brand, usually in news, trade press and blogs.
Distinct from conversation, which happens on social platforms and review sites. Products differ sharply in which of the two they read, and it is the first thing to establish about any monitoring tool.
Source
A publication, site or feed that material is collected from.
Source counts are not comparable between vendors. One vendor may count a publication as one source and another count each of its feeds separately. A source is also not a document: a single source can produce thousands of documents a month.
When a vendor states a source figure, the checkable question is whether the ten publications that matter in your market are covered, and how quickly.
Coverage window
The period a collection reaches back over.
Worth asking about explicitly, because it is rarely advertised. A current-coverage index answers what is being published now and cannot answer what was written two years ago. If a permanent record matters, export what you find while it is in range.
The OppAlerts News Index draws from more than four million feeds and keeps two monthly tables, so its reach is the current month and the previous one, roughly two million documents in a typical 30-day window. A feed is a source; a document is an individual item produced by one.
Discovery date and publication date
The discovery date is when a document entered the collection. The publication date is when its publisher put it online.
They are frequently far apart. A result appearing in today's report is not evidence that it was published recently, which matters when your message to a publisher describes something as new.
Unlinked mention
A page naming a business without an observed link to its website. The most directly actionable monitoring result, because the publisher has already decided the business is worth naming.
Share of voice
A brand's share of mentions across a defined set, against named competitors.
The definition has to accompany the number: which sources, which period, which competitors, and whether every mention counts equally regardless of the size of the publication.
Sentiment
An automated judgment of whether a mention is positive, negative or neutral.
OppAlerts does not score sentiment. Mentions are returned with their context so that a person can read them.
Where sentiment is available in other products, treat it as a triage aid rather than a measurement. Automated sentiment handles sarcasm, industry idiom and comparative statements poorly, and a mention placing your brand second in a list of three is not straightforwardly positive or negative.
Demographics
Reported attributes of the people discussing a brand, such as age, occupation or location.
OppAlerts does not report demographics. This requires social platform data the product does not read.
Anomaly detection
Identifying unusual changes in mention volume or reach.
OppAlerts does not perform anomaly detection. Reports show what was found; nothing raises a flag when the number moves unexpectedly.
Social listening
Monitoring conversation on social platforms and review sites.
OppAlerts is not a social listening product. It does not read social platforms or review sites. It monitors published pages: news, blogs, podcasts and stored web pages. If reputation risk in your market lives on social media, this product does not cover it and a listening platform does.
Journalist database
A curated record of reporters, their publications and the subjects they cover, maintained by a research team.
OppAlerts does not have one. What it returns is contact information a website publishes about itself, which is a different thing: a route into a publication rather than a named writer with a beat.
Media monitoring and media intelligence
Media monitoring reports where a brand appeared. Media intelligence usually describes a larger purchase that adds journalist research, distribution and analysis, and is normally priced per organization after a conversation rather than listed.
Refer to these terms when setting monitoring requirements. You can specify the coverage and measurements your team needs before evaluating a tool.
See how source coverage changes a monitoring tool or OppAlerts and brand monitoring platforms.