TRAC Historics are a huge part of our platform. This FAQ serves to answer some of the questions you may have on the historical creation and approval process.
Q: What does it mean to have my historical data approved and authorized?
A: When you order historical data on a TRAC search, you will always get what is called a Historical Data Preview first. This preview does not collect any data into the search. Instead, it gives you an estimate on the amount of data you will likely consume out of your overall monthly allowance, should you choose to collect that data into your search.
If you decide that this volume preview is fine, you then have the option to launch your historical data. And when you hit launch historics, this action needs to be authorized. Previously, you'd need a Pulsar team member to do this, but now this is done automatically, by the System.
There are some cases however, where you'll still need a Pulsar team member to review your order and manually authorize this for you, and this is when your historical request falls out of our automatic historical data collection criteria.
Q: So what are the guidelines for my historical data being automatically approved?
A: You must meet the following criteria for your historical request to be automatically approved:
The preview estimate for the historics cannot be greater than the amount of data allowance you have left in your data package.
The amount of historical data that will be collected into the search, cannot be greater than 100k mentions, per source or single order.
The search in which you want to collect the historical data cannot be too complex (applies to Twitter only).
Q: What is meant by the search being too complex?
A: Search complexity is a different measurement that we apply to searches, which looks at how much resources will be required for us to execute that search and collect data. A search's complexity is largely determined by how many keywords or authors that search is tracking, how many advanced boolean operators are in use, how many location or language targets are specified, and how many exclusions are built into the search. So with complex searches, even if the data size is low, which tends to be the case, these can take up a lot of processing power, more than that is required to process a simple search.
For example, a simple Keyword search for "pizza AND pineapple" will not take up a lot of resources to process, whereas a Panel search tracking the tweets of 1000 different Twitter authors would.
The easiest way to tell if your search is too complex is to just run a historic and see if it is automatically approved! If it doesn't, it's not that your search is bad! It just means you'll need one of our team members to approve it for you first.
Q: How do I know if my historics have or haven't been auto-approved?
A: The primary way you'll be able to tell is if you look and notice right away if your historic is running. But if you're still in doubt whether or not it was approved by the system or just a really fast team member, you can hover over the info icon shown to see who approved it
If your historic did not meet the qualification for auto-approval, you'll see it show with a caution icon and this will state the reasons for why your order requires a Pulsar team member to review it first.
If you're curious as to why it wasn't approved, try looking at the complexity of your query, the amount of data your team has left, or the size of the preview combined with all historics you already have running. If you're still confused reach out to us! We'll help determine what you can do in the future to get more historics approved ASAP.
Q: How fast can I expect my historics to be approved if they haven't been automatically approved by the system?
A: Our team tries to approve historical data requests as soon as they made, but time of day and day of the week can sometimes cause a delay in approval. For best approval times, keep your important searches to the window Mon-Fri 9AM-12AM GMT. However, if you're in need of a search to be approved ASAP, we don't mind you sending us a message and giving us a little nudge! That's what our support is for.
If you have any other questions about historics approval, please click our support chat tool icon in the bottom right corner, and we'll be happy to assist you with all of your concerns!