Choosing and setting up the right keywords is crucial for accurate and effective brand monitoring. The quality of your keywords directly impacts the relevance of the mentions you collect. This guide will walk you through the best practices for selecting and configuring your keywords in BrandMentions.

Before you start adding keywords to your project, it's important to think strategically about what you want to track. Here are the key principles for selecting effective keywords:

Your brand may be mentioned in multiple ways across the internet. To ensure comprehensive coverage, add all common variations, including:

•Official brand name: Skechers

•Common misspellings: Sketchers, Skecher

•Domain names: skechers.com, www.skechers.com

•Social media handles: @SkechersUSA, SkechersOfficial

By tracking all these variations, you avoid missing important mentions due to spelling differences or platform-specific naming conventions.

Hashtags are a powerful way to track branded campaigns and community conversations. Include:

•Brand hashtags: #Skechers, #SkechersShoes

•Campaign hashtags: #SkechersStyle, #WalkInComfort

•Product hashtags: #SkechersGOWalk, #SkechersAirCooled

Hashtags help you monitor specific campaigns and identify user-generated content related to your brand.

BrandMentions offers two match types for keywords:

•Exact Match: Only collects mentions that contain the exact keyword (case-insensitive).

•Broad Match: Collects mentions where the keyword appears within a larger phrase.

Choose exact match if you want precise results and are tracking a unique term. Choose broad match if you want to capture all variations and contextual mentions.

If your brand name is common or ambiguous, use filter keywords to narrow your results. For example:

•Main Keyword: Apple

•Filter Keyword: iPhone, iPad, MacBook

This ensures you only collect mentions where "Apple" appears alongside one of these product names, filtering out mentions about apple fruit or unrelated topics.

Excluded keywords help you filter out irrelevant mentions. For example:

•Main Keyword: Apple

•Excluded Keywords: fruit, recipe, pie, juice, orchard

This removes food-related mentions and focuses your tracking on the technology brand.

When setting up a new project, start with broad keywords and monitor the results for a few days. Review the collected mentions to identify patterns of noise or irrelevant content, then add excluded keywords to refine your tracking.

In addition to your own brand, consider tracking competitor names to benchmark your performance and identify market trends. Create separate projects for each competitor to keep data organized.

Beyond brand names, track broader industry topics to stay informed about trends and conversations in your market. For example, a fitness brand might track keywords like "home workout," "fitness trends," or "wellness."

If you have a Pro, Expert, or Enterprise plan, you can enable Boolean Query Tracking for advanced keyword logic. This allows you to use operators like AND, OR, and NOT to create complex search queries.

•Include all brand variations, misspellings, domains, and social handles in your main keywords.

•Use filter keywords (AND logic) to narrow results and focus on specific contexts.

•Use excluded keywords (NOT logic) to remove noise and irrelevant mentions.

•Configure sources, languages, and countries to match your monitoring goals.

•Start broad and refine your keywords based on the data you collect.

By following these best practices, you'll set up a BrandMentions project that delivers accurate, relevant, and actionable insights.