Learning Outcomes
You will learn where you can find the filters within your TRAC dashboard.
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 area of your mentions 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 examine 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.
![Screen Recording 2024-01-17 at 3.25.40 PM.mov [video-to-gif output image]](https://pulsar.intercom-attachments-1.com/i/o/936489754/cb5c71787515b07dfc6271ef/ezgif-1-f5c857d5c7.gif?expires=1732347000&signature=928bddea7d1265a9df3de669e5d8dfddab42ae73fdf03c2144abf548ef6f4b10&req=fSMhEsF3moRbFb4f3HP0gHGyMpQzz5YMNeSRyypqpXuYdMwT4Y2Jiz6YLeiv%0ApvR6JdIuuWIJrvwGQQ%3D%3D%0A)
Using Filters
On nearly every subpage within TRAC you will find a filter on the top-right of your screen, next to the date range. This filter provides a way for you to quickly and easily manipulate the information presented by allowing you to narrow the results by date range, keywords, sentiment, etc.
The only exception to this rule is the "Search" page which is located within "Content Insights". The filter is available, however, it will affect the visuals that you will find within that subpage.
Visit different pages of TRAC to take advantage of the filter and quickly narrow results to what you're looking for.
Video Explainer
Before we delve into the specifics around the filter, please have a watch of this video which will give you an overview of the feature and how you can use it.
Keywords
This filter is a great way to isolate your results and focus on the posts that are most relevant to you, either within a specific date range, or posts with specific keywords.
You can use this section of the filter to search within your results for social posts and media items that contain specific keywords and phrases
📝 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
These filters are a great way to slice your data and focus on results that are more specific.
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 see, 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!
6. 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 tweet subtype that you want to focus on. This is particularly useful for distinguishing between engagement types such as Retweets, Replies and Quote tweets.
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
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 Demographic menu, 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.
Cities & Countries: You can filter your data by location.
Languages: You can filter your data by language.
Authors
If there are posts from a specific author(s) you would like to see, you can insert their X 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
The analysis section of the filter is used to narrow down your results to view all posts in a dataset based on different areas of advanced analysis.
Emotion: You can use this to filter your dataset based on one of the five emotions that are analysed - anger, fear, disgust, joy, sadness
Credibility: You can use this to filter by a certain area of credibility - credible, non-credible, satirical, user generated.
Image Tags: If image analysis is enabled, you can filter based on particular image tags.
Image Text: You can use this to filter based on text that has been identified in imagery collected on social posts or media items within your dataset.
Entities: You can use this to filter based on a particular entity within your search.
Metrics
The Metrics section of the filter is used to narrow down your results to view all posts in a dataset based on key metrics.
Followers of the user who has posted.
Likes on each individual post.
Engagements on each individual post.
Visibility on each individual post. on each individual post.
Media Reach on each individual post.
AVE on each individual post.
Credibility on each media item.
Saved Filters
At the bottom of the filter menu, you will be able to access all of your saved filters.
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.
🚀 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.