Monitoring media coverage can become a very costly exercise, particularly for multi channel content.
Ace Media is here with a few budget-friendly ideas to help keep the cost down and results high.
Activity tracker
Keep track of the requests you receive from journalists and media representatives. Whether an image request, sample, interview, or simply further information. Ensure you have a spreadsheet handy to record these interactions.
Ace Media’s Activity tool makes light work of this task by automatically recording the views and downloads of any PR assets you’ve added to the platform. When content is downloaded (Press release, Lookbook, or individual files), Activity provides a valuable pipeline of what was downloaded, when it was downloaded, by whom, and a publication date.
Using this information, you’ll know exactly where and when to lookout for coverage!
Online
Web-based coverage can be a lot simpler to source, provided you know how.
Google Alerts – a free platform for monitoring the web. It is however only capable of delivering web mentions and ignores any mentions on social media channels.
Social Mention – complements Google Alerts. This free app helps you track the conversation on social media channels. A useful advanced search option enables you to filter the results by sources, date, language, and location. The drawback is that you can’t create an account which means you’re unable to track keywords automatically.
Talkwalker Alerts – an alternative to Google Alerts and Social Mention. Talkwalker alerts combines monitoring of blogs, forums, websites and social media channels. Using this free application you can customise your alerts to ensure you only receive the most relevant mentions.
Offline
Print media can be a lot trickier to monitor, until more recent years ‘budget’ monitoring would entail regular trips to your local newsagent. Thankfully, there are new applications that can provide access to digitalised versions of print titles.
YUMPU News – pitching itself as a ‘Spotify for publishers’, this relative newcomer launched in the UK just last year (Feb 2021), marking its first major expansion since launching in Germany and Austria in 2020. Having already signed up 95% of the UK publishing market, it has quickly become a vast resource of digitalised national and regional newspapers, mainstream and specialist magazines, and business titles.
You can keep track of specific titles or run a search across their entire catalogue of media outlets; ideal for unearthing articles about your client! Simply, type your keyword (client brand, product) into the search bar and click ‘Pages’. This will display the search results highlighting the keyword within the article on the pages displayed.
Media locations: UK, Germany, Austria
Trial period available
Priced at £7.99 /mo*
Readly – this easy-to-use application provides access to over 5000 digitalised media outlets globally. Whilst these include both magazines and newspapers, we found that there’s a significantly higher volume of magazine titles. We counted a total of 15 national newspapers serving England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. As with YUMPU, you can utilise the search function to return articles across their entire catalogue of media outlets.
Media locations: Europe, Asia, Oceania, Americas, Africa
Trial period available
Priced at £9.99 /mo*
PressReader – provides access to over 7000 top publications (magazines and newspapers) from around the globe. It offers an excellent resource of major international newspaper titles and supports a large quantity of international magazines. It is however the most expensive of the bunch.
Media locations: Europe, Asia, Oceania, Americas, Africa
Trial period available
Priced at £27.49 /mo*
Cafeyn – better suited for monitoring French, Italian and Canadian (English & French) magazines. There are a handful of UK titles but not as comprehensive as its competitors.
Media locations: UK, France, Italy and Canada
Trial period available
Priced at £7.99 /mo*
Apple News+ – if you have access to iOS, ipadOS, watchOS and macOS operating system, this is another great resource for magazines and newspapers. The list of publications is not yet as comprehensive as the likes of YUMPU News, Readly and PressReader. The app provides you with the option to search by channel, topic and stories, making it very straightforward to find articles.
Media locations: US, UK
Trial period available
Priced at £9.99 /mo*
Reporting your results
Once you’ve gathered your media coverage, you may wish to present a report to demonstrate your success.
Ace Media can help here too, Reports is a time-saving application that helps improve PR measurement.
Capable of delivering over 40 useful metrics across offline (print/broadcast), online (websites/blogs) and social media posts. It will calculate your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and provide a professional presentation that will impress your clients / stakeholders.
Do you have any alternative suggestions? If so, we’d love to hear about them.
Post a comment with your favourite budget-friendly media monitoring resources below.
*Prices may vary. Correct at point of publication
Tips & Hints 