Learning Outcomes
You will learn where you can find the filters within your TRAC search.
You will understand more about how you can use the filters to hone in on and isolate specific content.
What is Filtering?
Filtering on TRAC is the ability to slice and dice your dataset to isolate or focus on very specific content. This could be a particular channel, author, sentiment, keywords or phrases, location, domain etc - there are lots of possibilities as to how you can filter your datasets.
Why Use It?
Filtering your data can be useful when you want to investigate a specific part of your search results and its content in more detail. For example, if you want to conduct sentiment analysis on a particular set of mentions, you could filter for those mentions by keywords and sentiment before conducting the sentiment analysis. Additionally, you can further analyse your dataset by adding additional criteria to your original filter.
Filtering your dataset on TRAC is an important skill that can help you analyze and understand your data more easily. Being able to hone in on specific elements of your dataset will give you more detail on how those elements interact with other elements in the dataset.
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Using Filters
On every page within TRAC search (bar Search Settings and Content insights>Search), you will find the filter function on the top-right of your screen, next to the date range. This filter function provides a way for you to quickly and easily interrogate the data presented, using filters like date range, keywords, sentiment, etc. Visit the different sections within a TRAC search using the left hand navigation menu, to filter and quickly narrow your search results to what you're looking for.
Video Explainer
Before we delve into the specifics around the filter function, we recommend that you watch this video, which will give you an overview of the feature and how you can use it.
Keywords Filter
This filter is a great way to isolate your results and focus on the content that contains or matches specific keywords. You can use the keywords filter to search across any type of content, be it social posts, news media items, or podcast clips, that contain specific keywords and phrases. If you're stuck, we provide a nifty boolean operator guide below the keywords editor, which you can refer to, to ensure your keywords filter captures the relevant data.
📝 NB: There is a 100 operator limit when using the keyword filters on TRAC. You can use any combination of boolean operators supported, but the number of operators to bear in mind is 100 operators max, in a single filter.
Target Filters
These filters are a great way to slice your data and focus on content that meets a specific criteria, hence the name "target".
Within the Target menu, you have a number of options to filter by:
Type - choose whether you would like to see either posts or engagements.
Sentiment - choose to see content that's only positive, negative or neutral.
Media - choose the type of media you would like to view, for example you may want to view posts with images only because you're only interested in the types of visuals that may have been shared around your topic.
Source - select the sources you would like to focus on, for example you may only be interested in seeing posts from Instagram.
Domains - if you would like to view posts from a specific website, enter the domain here. The domain must be entered in lowercase!
Tags - filter for posts that have been manually assigned a specific tag.
You can also be more specific by selecting Advanced Target filters
This allows you to apply some additional target filters
Tweet Subtype: For X data only, you can specify the post subtype that you want to focus on. This is particularly useful for distinguishing between engagement types such as Reposts, Replies and Quotes.
Post ID: You can use this to filter for a particular social post based on its post ID.
News Licenses: If you have different news licenses, you can filter for a specific one. In the example below, you can see that we're only filtering for publicly available online news content. You can read more about news licenses here.
Data Types: If you have First Party Data in your Pulsar search, you can filter based on the data type using this filter within the Target section.
Demographics Filters
These filters are a great way to segment your data and focus on the posts that have been generated by a particular group of people.
Within the Demographics filter, you have a number of options:
Gender: You can filter the data by Male, Female or Unknown.
Bio: If you have collected X data, you can search for keywords within the authors' bios. For instance, you can see that we are looking for users who have the following bio keywords: Gamer, Streamer, TTV.
Job Titles: Filter by Job Titles (Only for Industry Panels)
Company: Filter for specific companies you're interested in (Only for Industry Panels)
Industries: Filter for industries (Only for Industry Panels)
Countries, Regions & Cities: You can filter your data by location.
Authors Filters
If there are posts from a specific author(s) you would like to see, you can insert their user handle in this filter. Alternatively, if you would like to remove an author from your results, click the + button next to Authors, and this will change to a - to exclude that author.
Analysis Filters
The analysis section of the filter contains filters that you can choose to view your results based on the different types of analysis we apply to each piece of content that we collect.
Emotion: You can use this to filter for content that contains any of the five emotions that are able to detect in a post: anger, fear, disgust, joy, sadness.
Credibility: You can use this to filter for online news content from outlets that are deemed to be credible, non-credible, satirical, or user generated.
Image Tags: If image analysis is enabled, you can use this to filter for content that contains specific image tags.
Image Text: You can use this to filter for specific text found in the images that are being shared in your search results.
Entities: You can use this to filter for content that contains specific entities; entities can either be people or organisations.
Metrics Filters
The Metrics filter section is used to narrow down your results to view posts that contain specific metrics, whereby you can set the range of the values you're interested for each metric.
No. of Followers of the user who has posted.
No. of Likes for each post.
No. of Engagements for each post.
Visibility for each post.
Social Impressions for each post.
Media Reach for each individual post.
Media Impressions for each post
AVE for each post/outlet.
Credibility for each media post/outlet.
Saved Filters
At the bottom of the filter menu, you will be able to access all of your saved filters. 'Saved filters' functionality are a handy feature that makes filtering for data on TRAC easy and efficient. It provides you with the tools necessary to preserve specific slices of the dataset (based on any of the filters above), which you can easily return to, as well apply to any view in your TRAC search.
Saved filters are created in three different ways:
Regular Filters: In this article you can find all the filters you are using at a regular base.
Custom charts: This tab will populate filters from the segments of your created custom charts.
Reports: Filters here come from any active filters on reports you have for the given search.
To learn more about Saved Filters, check out this user guide here.
🚀 Top Tip: Saved filters are really handy if there's a particular aspect of your dataset that you want to revisit later, or if you want to share some insights with a colleague.