Pulsar 3.0 is here, and it’s a whole new product. It brings together many of the innovations we’ve recently brought to market under one overarching logic, and sets them on much more powerful rails, which will serve as the foundation for any future innovation.
Today's release is the first of many, aimed at introducing 4 distinct revolutions to the audience intelligence industry, each enabled by a series of recent, new, and upcoming functionalities. The 4 revolutions are:
Universal Scope: more and more signals from your audience – from Broadcast & Print News data, to upcoming Discord and local news data.
Extreme Relevance: deeper context to any piece of content – from NewsGuard Insights, to the new dedicated audience insights dashboard, to upcoming Narrative detection.
Verticalized Experience: a product adapting to your needs, by industry and use case – from Vertical AI models to the new PR & Marketing View Modes, and new Social & Media metrics.
Immersive Awareness: a product that comes to you even when you're not using it – from recurring reports, to the new Coverage Reports, to the upcoming Mobile App & Live Alerts.
Keep reading for a comprehensive breakdown of the major updates and functionalities you can expect to see in Pulsar 3.0.
Multiple View Modes
We have introduced multiple view modes on TRAC, which are based on different use cases: PR & Comms use case, Marketing Insights use case, or General Listening use case.
After conducting extensive user research, it became evident that we needed a platform that could provide a dynamic view of the same data to cater to the different needs of our clients, more effectively. Our research also revealed that there are unique workflows and tools exclusive to some clients, for example those in PR & Comms, such as Shortlists, Coverage Reports, and Daily Briefings. Therefore, a dynamic use case-based experience allows us to incorporate these additional functionalities seamlessly and lays the groundwork for us to serve different cohorts of clients on a single platform.
The main differences between the view modes are the following:
The navigation of TRAC & order of sections.
Specific workflows - for example, the manual content curation workflow, shortlists, coverage reports & daily briefings will only be available in PR & Comms view.
Chart filtering options
Available Report Templates
Different Terminology
Learn more about:
Transitioning to a Vertical Navigation
We've switched our navigation menu design from horizontal to vertical. The navigation menu, which you had been used to seeing across the top of the page, will now be located in a toggle-able sidebar on the left-hand side of the screen. We’re transitioning to a vertical layout because it creates more real estate across each section. This means that more charts can be seen on the page, helping to give more focus to each featured chart.
A New All Searches Page
The new navigation of TRAC starts with a new "All Searches" page, which provides users with a centralised view of all their searches in one place. In this page you can:
Sort your searches by velocity, creation date, last modified date and search name.
Sort manually by drag and drop.
Quickly review and edit your search criteria.
Filter for searches by data source.
See the status of each search, i.e. running in real time, collecting historical data, paused or completed.
Learn more about the New All Searches Page.
A New Snapshot Overview
We are excited to announce a new Snapshot Overview, which is designed to give you a comprehensive view of your data. It features a summary of your key performance metrics, share of voice for your data sources, top performing content, demographic breakdown of who's talking, summary of the most influential people in the conversation, and so much more.
The Snapshot Overview is a great starting point for data analysis as it allows you to get a quick overview of your data and insights at a glance. We have also included the Snapshot Overview as a custom dashboard template in the Reports section, which you can edit and customise before sharing with colleagues or clients. We hope that the Snapshot Overview will help you easily explore your data and make informed decisions.
Learn more about:
Content Insights
We now have a new Content Insights section on TRAC, where you'll find everything you need to know about your content, including:
A timeline view of the data that's been collected
Keywords, topics, hashtags and entities analysis
Top content analysis
Image analysis
Most shared articles and videos
Credible sites and outlets
Top data sources and websites
Insights on location, and so much more!
Learn more about:
Audience Insights
Similar to how we've grouped content under Content Insights, we also now have a new section called Audience Insights, where you'll find everything you need to know about who is talking and who is influential. This is where you can understand everything about your audience, including:
A demographic summary of who they are
Community analysis to identify the various segments of authors participating in the conversation
Influencer analysis by vocality, media reach, impressions, or visibility
Credible voices either sharing or publishing content
Influencer network analysis to identify who is reacting to whom, therefore at the centre of the conversation
Learn more about:
A New Feed View
Formerly known as Results, the Feed view is where you can see the raw posts that have been collected in a search sorted by newest to oldest by default. We have stripped the noise from the main window, keeping only the important metrics and analysis in this view. You can however still access the additional metadata by toggling on the "expand" icon at the top of the results page, or by clicking into a content row, which opens up a side panel view of the highlighted post.
The Feed view will still have the ability to filter results, tag posts, export results, and sort results by published date, visibility, media reach, social impressions, social shares, engagements, rating, credibility, circulation and likes. For PR & Comms users, we have also added the ability to curate and shortlist content that can be used in building a Coverage Report.
Learn more about the New Feed View.
New Metrics
We've added new metrics to help understand your performance across various online platforms. We now have Velocity, Media Reach, Social Impressions, and Social Shares. Below is a brief outline of each metric:
Velocity is the rate at which conversations happen around a specific topic and gives you an additional lens to understand the scale of the conversation, not only in it's totality, but how it's spread over a period of time.
Media Reach measures the size of the potential audience of a piece of content i.e. Potential Media Reach. On Pulsar, this metric applies to media monitoring data sources like Online News, Print and Broadcast content, and is used to provide an estimate of the number of people who have read or viewed a piece of media.
Social Impressions are the number of times a post has been displayed in a timeline, whether the post is clicked on, or not. In other words, it’s an estimate of how many times people have most likely seen or been exposed to a piece of content.
Social Shares are the number of times that a news or blog article has been shared on social platforms like Facebook. This metric can help you measure the popularity of content and allows you to have a better sense of how media coverage around a specific topic is being received and shared on social media.
A New Reports Section + New Templates
We are pleased to bring you a new Reports section, formerly known as Custom Dashboards in the legacy TRAC. This is the section of the tool where you can:
Set up your KPI alerts
Set up your Email Digests
Create new Custom Dashboards from scratch, or using our brand new templates!
Schedule recurring reports
Access existing Custom Dashboards
Coming Soon! Understand Public Discourse with Narratives Analysis
On Pulsar, we believe in helping people understand conversations and public discourse. That's why we've introduced Narratives, a data analysis approach that uses topic detection and conversation clustering to group and track conversations over time. With Narratives Analysis, you'll be able to better analyze conversations and identify the main voices, their motivations, and how these narratives evolve over time.
Traditional approaches to data analysis don't always account for the changing nature of conversations, or the different views and motivations of the people taking part. Narrative Analysis acknowledges that conversations, perspectives, and views evolve over time and teaches us to think about these conversations in terms of sequences instead of just an abstract collection of opinions. For example, if you're running an Ad or PR campaign, or maybe a product launch, you'd want to keep track of how public opinion today is different from yesterday. This way, you can measure the success of your campaign or launch and be able to act promptly when new information comes to light.
Narratives Analysis will be available on the new TRAC in beta, in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for the announcement.
There's a lot more that you can expect from the new TRAC, including some fixes to the issues you've fed back to us via Collaborate and Intercom. We strongly believe that we now have a solid function to build on top of, so watch this space for more exciting new functionality coming into the new TRAC this year!