Power BI, a very popular Business Intelligence tool, can work wonders when fed appropriate data. You will be happy to know that you can directly feed it with Mention data using the Mentionlytics API. This is a step-by-step guide on how to connect Power BI with the Mentionlytics API.

First, ensure you initialize your Mentionlytics API and retrieve your access token. If you haven't obtained your access token yet, refer to the documentation The Mentionlytics API for guidance.

Once you have your access token, you can utilize it to access data from the Mentionlytics API by making requests to a URL structured like this:

This URL will fetch mentions of your Brand Monitoring mention tracker for the previous 7 days. For more complex queries, consult The Mentionlytics API documentation.

In the home tab click Get data to see all the available data sources.

Since we want to get the data from the Mentionlytics API we select the web data source option.

In the window that appears we enter the Mentionlytics API URL we want to get the data from.

For this example, we will use this URL and click OK:

https://app.mentionlytics.com/api/mentions?token=xxxxxxxxx

(Remember to replace xxxxxxxxx with your actual token)

Next, a window will pop up with two columns. We need to click the List button in the first column

This will open the list with the records. In order to be able to view the data properly, click Convert To Table

and then click OK.

The only thing left is to expand the Record properties by clicking the button shown in the picture below:

In the options window that opens, check the properties you want to keep.

Make sure to uncheck the Use original column name as prefix option because it will complicate the column names that will be generated.

Then click OK. Now you should be able to see the information you checked for each mention.

Finally, click the Close and Apply button to load the data in the Power BI dashboard.

In the Power BI dashboard, we can see the data fetched from the Mentionlytics API in the Data panel. By clicking the arrow button we can see in detail what info this table contains.

With this info, we can create a line chart for the total mentions we had for each day. To do this, click the line chart icon to add the graph to the canvas.

In the X and Y axis of the line chart we drag and drop the pub_date and the total_count info as shown in the image below.

Now we have a chart that displays the total mentions for each date.

Important note: Since the data from the API are constantly updated it would be a good practice to refresh the data by right clicking on the data table and then clicking the Refresh data button.

This will try to fetch the data from the Mentionlytics API, ensuring you have the latest data. You can also schedule the refresh to happen automatically throughout the day. Check Power BI Refresh Scheduling Documentation for more information.