How to Successfully Track Google Mentions? Guide for 2024

Adidas stirred up the internet on March 14 with their Euro 2024 kit release. This news generated 5,696 mentions, reaching 56.5 million people. The most active platforms were X (Twitter) and news sites, followed by TikTok. Notably, sentiments were diverse, with frequent comparisons between Adidas and Nike. On that single day, AVE of mentions reached $4.1 million. 

How do I know? I used an advanced mentions tracking tool.

Monitoring mentions is all about tracking certain words and phrases across online sources. This practice allows you to keep an eye on your online performance and monitor your company’s progress. Besides mentions, specialized online monitoring tools provide actionable insights informing your marketing strategy. They alert you about potential PR crises and detect the reasons behind all your metrics.

Nowadays, we’ve reached the point where if your business is not online, it doesn’t exist. 

According to Trustmary, 93% of consumers read online reviews before purchasing, and 58% is ready to pay more for a product or service with great reviews.

That’s why you should take care of your brand’s online image. Monitoring mentions is indispensable for your company to thrive in the online realm.

Table of contents:

• What are Google mentions?
• How to track Google mentions?
  • Manual tracking
  • Create Google Alerts
  • Use a media monitoring tool
• How to analyze mentions to gain insights?
• Conclusion

What are Google mentions?

Google mentions refer to instances where your brand, product, or service is mentioned or referenced on the internet. It includes websites, blogs, forums, new content, and news articles indexed by Google’s search engine.

These mentions play a crucial role in shaping your online presence and reputation. They provide valuable insights into how your brand is perceived and what people say about your services.

However, not all mentions are tagged or directly linked to your brand’s account. Thus, it’s challenging and time-consuming to track them manually. 

This is where media monitoring tools like Brand24 come in handy. 

They automatically capture all untagged mentions across various online platforms. This allows you to stay informed and proactive in managing your online reputation.

Benefits of tracking mentions in Google search:

• Gain insights into your brand’s online presence and reputation across platforms indexed by Google.
• Understand how your products or services are perceived by monitoring what people are saying.
• Stay updated on emerging trends, discussions, and topics related to your brand within Google search results.
• Conduct competitor analysis and SWOT analysis.
• Manage and protect your brand image by promptly addressing negative feedback.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and initiatives in Google search results.
• Identify potential influencers mentioning your brand positively and engage with them to expand your brand reach online.

How to track Google mentions?

Three main methods exist for monitoring mentions in Google search: manual, using Google Alerts, and employing dedicated media monitoring tools.

The most effective tactic is this last one.

These tools not only track online mentions but also calculate multiple metrics based on them. This way, they provide a comprehensive overview of your online performance.

Google Alerts offers automation for collecting mentions but is not exhaustive. While it tracks mentions, it lacks analysis, resulting in no insights for your marketing strategy.

Google Alerts is also significantly limited regarding platform coverage.

Lastly, manual mention management is a tedious process that consumes significant time and yields poor results.

Now that you’re familiar with these methods let’s examine each more closely to help you make an informed decision.

01 Manual tracking

Let’s be honest. This one is a Sisyphean task. 

You would need to look for your keywords in the Google search results. 

It’s almost impossible to find relevant results among hundred thousands of sites. You will get stuck between your own business pages, advertisements, and completely irrelevant results. 

You can try to be more specific and search terms like:

• [your brand] + blog
• [your brand] + review
• [your brand] + article

However, as you can imagine, it still would be mostly a fruitless attempt. 

Let’s try it on the Starbucks example. 

I searched for “Starbucks blog”. The first few results are, of course, Starbucks business pages. After scrolling down, I see some interesting search results.

As you can see some of the results are relevant, but verifying them would be time-consuming. 

Let’s see a more efficient method to monitor mentions.

02 Create Google Alerts

Google Alerts has one major advantage: it is a free tool, unlike most media monitoring software. It’s also very easy to use due to its simplicity.

This is both a pro and a con.

On the one hand, a simple dashboard is easy to navigate; on the other, it is not exhaustive in the case of Google Alerts. 

Google Alerts allow you to do simple keywords tracking within the Google search. It covers blog posts, the web, videos, books, and discussion forums.

You will be notified about every instance of your tracked keyword publishing within these sources.

Unfortunately, Google Alerts doesn’t monitor social media. It’s a significant shortcoming in the era when more than half of the world uses social media every day (according to Smart Insights Digital Marketing). 

That’s why you should primarily keep an eye on social media. 

Maybe your product has just gone viral on TikTok thanks to influencer enforcement… or maybe, on the contrary, an influential person criticized your services on her Instagram, causing your orders to decline.

It’s all worth knowing, but unfortunately, Google Alerts won’t provide this crucial insight.

The biggest drawbacks of Google Alerts reported by customers are:

• Too late or no results
• Limited sources
• Filters don’t work
• Loads of spam
• Lack of customer care and educational resources
• Sometimes, it doesn’t find content that is already on the web

On the plus side, you can track keywords in any language and region with Google Alerts. But let’s be honest – it doesn’t compensate for all its downsides. 

However, if you still want to try this web monitoring tool, here’s how to set up Google Alerts:

1. Go to Google Alerts.
2. Enter a topic you want to monitor.
3. Click Show options to change Google alert settings.
4. Click Create alert to get Gmail notifications when you keyword is mentioned on any website.

Having tested Google alerts, you may want to disable it from sending you Gmail notifications.

We’ve got you covered! 

Here’s our guide on how to turn off a Google alert.

Now, let’s move on to a brand monitoring method that provides only the best results.

03 Use a social media monitoring tool

Social media monitoring tools are the most efficient and streamlined way of tracking your keywords and phrases online.

Their coverage goes beyond Google search results, providing a complete picture of your brand online situation.

Brand24 tracks the conversations about your business across the web, including:

• News sites
• Blogs
• Forums
• Review sites
• Newsletters
• Podcasts

The tool also covers social platforms:

• Instagram
• X (Twitter)
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• Pinterest
• TikTok
• Quora
• Twitch

When practicing social listening, tools like Brand24 are limited to collecting mentions from publicly available sources. Data from any private account is excluded from the analysis to uphold privacy standards. 

While this may be considered a limitation, the tool’s extensive platform coverage helps to offset it.

You will find several filtering options on the right-hand side of the dashboard. You can choose from the sources, sentiment, influence score, specific country, and many other settings to narrow down your results. 

If there is a combination of filters that you want to track frequently, you can save the filter and quickly retrieve it whenever needed.

Brand24 not only collects all your mentions in one place but also analyzes them and provides actionable insights into your online performance.

In your dashboard, you will find Anomaly Detector. 

It appears as an exclamation mark on your Reach & Mentions chart at its peaks. When you click on it, you will learn the reason behind the peak and the authors propelling the discussion.

This feature facilitates your reputation management. It helps you spot an emerging PR crisis at its early stage and act before it’s too late.

Plus, Anomaly Detection informs your future marketing strategy by explaining the reasoning behind the success of your reach. It could be your newest campaign, influencer collaboration, or social media activity. 

If you examine the reason for the increased reach, you will be able to leverage the same action in the future and stimulate your reach.

Thanks to Anomaly Detection, you don’t need to browse thousands of mentions to find their common denominator. Brand24 does it automatically for you.

Another helpful feature is Comparison. You can use it to compare multiple projects (for instance, for competitor analysis) or juxtapose periods within one project.

The period comparison allows you to track your progress and see how your results have changed over time.

For instance, let’s look at the Starbucks project.

We can see that the company got way fewer user-generated content mentions in the current period than in the previous one. This caused a lower social media reach. Additionally, the sentiment worsened. 

All this impacted AVE, which dropped by 12% between the periods.

Interestingly, the online Presence Score increased. The question is if this is positive news. 

Looking at other metrics, we can assume that the higher Presence Score is mainly a result of negative engagement.

Overall, Starbucks’s online performance deteriorated in the current period. This should be a big concern for the company, and the reason behind it should be found to reverse the negative trend as quickly as possible. 

Of course, Brand24 rushes to help. Further insights into a brand’s performance can be found in other sections of your dashboard.

One beneficial tab is Topic Analysis. This AI-powered function detects the most prominent topics within your brand mentions. It allows you to detect the most talked about customer pain points.

You can check the sentiment for every topic to see which matters are the source of negativity.

Another way to address negative sentiment around your company name is browsing through mentions. They provide direct customer feedback, an invaluable knowledge source for businesses.

Set the sentiment to negative using the filtering option in your main dashboard and take in your customers feedback. 

And remember to act! 

The best way to handle negative comments is to answer them and offer a solution. 

Benefits of tracking mentions with an advanced monitoring tool:

• Direct customer feedback examples collection with a responding option
• Social media and non-social reach insights
• Sentiment analysis of the collected mentions
• PR crisis prevention with Anomaly Detection feature
• Extensive settings allow you to customize your searches
• Multiple metrics help you monitor your online performance
• The comparison feature facilitates competitor analysis and progress monitoring

How to analyze mentions to gain insights?

Your mentions can be a source of valuable insights. The only thing you need is the right tool that will support your analysis.

Look no further than Brand24, which has a bunch of useful insights for you. 

Not to waste your time on analyzing individual metrics and their impact, we introduced AI-powered features like AI Insights and Metrics Analysis. 

These two automatically analyze your project data and display the ultimate insights. You don’t need to work on the conclusion – the tool does it for you. 

And a cherry on the top: AI Brand Assistant. 

You can ask it any question regarding your monitoring project. It will develop a well-explained answer supported by your project data and an example. 

This way, you can be sure it’s giving you credible information.

Conclusion

In summary, external monitoring tools furnish a complex end-to-end analysis of your online keyword performance. 

Advanced settings allow you for a targeted analysis of your businesses’ reception among your clients on the internet. Additionally, AI-powered metrics support a fast identification of trends and potential PR crises.

However, Google Alerts may be enough for some businesses, especially for small companies that collect under 1000 mentions monthly.

Let’s be honest; Google Alerts is a free solution which raises its competitiveness.

Obviously, at the same time, it compromises the metrics and insights it provides. But that’s the price you pay for choosing a free and simple solution.

To make the best decision, test both Google Alerts and Brand24. See what works best for you!

Final thoughts: 

• Navigating Google in search for your company name mentions is a tedious task. A dedicated brand monitoring tool will simplify and automate this process.
• Mere monitoring is not enough. You need metrics and AI-powered insights to interpret your overall business performance based on your online mentions.
• Brand24 offers AI-powered insights and metrics that inform your online performance in detail. They help you prevent a PR crisis, monitor progress, and better connect to your audience.
• With Brand24, you can customize your social media monitoring project to ensure that you will collect only the best results.