You can choose to collect historical data in your search at any time, either at the time of setting up a new search, or even after you’ve created and launched your search.
For New Searches
When on the final step of a search setup, you will be directed to the Status Page upon creation.
For Existing Searches
The Status Page can be found in the search settings under the wrench/spanner icon.
Steps to Preview & Order Historical Data
Enter your desired Date Range in the Start & End Date input boxes.
Select the Data Sources you want to collect data from.
Click Preview.
Pulsar will automatically provide a Preview for the data sources you have selected, allowing you to estimate how much data your historical order will bring in. Please note that expected results are an estimate not an exact figure.
Tip: You get a spark line to show you the volume of daily mentions so should you only require topline insights, you can simply download an Excel (.xls) export of the mention counts without using up any of your data allowance.
If you are happy with the estimated number of results and want to launch the historics, click the green rocket button.
If you have previewed more than one data source, you can also click the "Launch All" button.
Alternatively, you can choose to launch individual data sources at a time, if you don't want to launch all the historics at once.
What happens next?
Your request will go into In Review mode meaning this needs to be approved by any one of our Account Managers, or through our Intercom support team.
The Launch button will remain In Review, until a member of the Account Management team has authorised your request and confirmed that it is within your allocated data allowance. This is done to ensure you don’t go over your data allowance and incur any overages.
Once your historic order has been approved, you will receive a confirmation email that your request has been approved and your data is now being collected. You don’t need to do anything else at this point.
Your data will be available in your dashboard within a few minutes and you can check the green progress bar to view their status of your historics. It will say 100% completed once it has been pulled in your search!
What other uses and opportunities are there for previewing historical data volumes?
You can use historical data volumes to help with gauging and predicting real-time results. When you’re setting up a real-time search and you’re unsure of the volume of mentions you’re going to pull in once the search is launched, by running a historical data preview for a period across a few days it is a great start to understand whether your search might be too narrow or too broad.
With the historical data previews, you can also utilise the quant volume metric with no real intention to even launch the search, therefore enabling you to not have to use any of your data allowance. For example, a client asks you to compare the volume of conversation of Trump vs Clinton on Twitter over the past 6 months. To achieve this you simply set up a search and run a preview, take the numbers away and there you have a volume comparison. No data needed, with results delivered.
To take this one step further, once you have previewed the data, you have the opportunity to export the daily volumes from Pulsar into Excel using the dropdown on the right hand side of the preview next to the Launch button:
This allows you to see any interesting spikes in conversation that you may wish to investigate further in the dashboard, while also allowing you to collate the data in Excel and overlay those high volume type searches on one chart to show the comparison. i.e. Trump vs Clinton
This snapshot reporting functionality is great for:
Ad-hoc questions from clients / stakeholders where only a top line view is needed on a very broad question.
Snapshot stats to include in quick turnaround pitches.
As part of your desk research for more exploratory searching. For example, if you are tasked with mapping the packaging category, this could give you a really good idea of seasonality and when these niche conversations are occurring.
Here you can view all the available historical data options.