If you maintain an outreach list, you need to find new candidates for the contribution routes your business can actually use. Configure opportunity searches in a campaign to count matching News Index and Prospect Index pages each day. The dashboard then shows how many new candidates appeared for each type of placement you care about.
Define the opportunity and the market
Opportunity Types covers contributions, podcasts, directories, events, sponsorships and other participation formats. Its queries combine the selected type with the campaign's market terms.
The campaign's Opportunities tab is where you configure which searches the daily dashboard counts.
Label by the task, not the subject
The label should describe a task rather than a broad subject, because the label is what the dashboard tells you when a count moves.
"Guest contribution" and "speaking submission" are tasks. Somebody reading a count of eleven knows what eleven of those are and what to do with them.
"Restaurant technology" is a subject. A count of eleven tells you eleven pages matched a topic, which includes news articles, competitor pages and anything else about the field. Nobody can act on that, and it is the most common configuration mistake.
Open the discoveries from the dashboard
Each opportunity has separate rows for the two indexes across recent days. Selecting a count opens the matching records.
Counted days with no results show zero. Uncounted days remain distinct from those. A missing count is not a day with no opportunities, and treating the two as the same produces a chart with holes read as quiet periods.
A new match is not a new page
The daily interval ends at 09:00 UTC and uses the time pages entered the index.
A new match can be an older page discovered recently. A resource list published in 2019 and collected yesterday appears today as new. Describe it as newly discovered, not recently published.
Check the source before saying anything about timing.
Verify whether participation is still available
A result can be an open request, an old request, or a page describing past participation. Those look identical in a count.
Read the source for the current deadline, eligibility, fees and submission process before treating a row as an available opportunity. An awards page describing last year's finalists matches the same search as one accepting entries.
What the counts are not
They measure discoveries in collected data. They do not measure your team's work, and a month with higher counts is not a month with more placements earned.
Use your own records to report the opportunities you pursued and the placements you secured. Use the dashboard counts to find new prospects.
When reviewing daily discoveries, check the current participation requirements before assigning time to a candidate.
See the campaign dashboard, the Prospect Index, or deciding which prospects are worth the effort.