Tracking entities, topics & publishers

Tracking is how you tell a project which parts of Discover you actually care about. The Explorer shows you everything Google is surfacing in your markets; tracking is the opposite move — you pin a handful of specific entities, trends, categories or publishers to your radar, and from then on the project watches them for you. Tracked items are what drive Mentions, feed your alerts, and populate the at-a-glance counts in the left sidebar.

You can track five kinds of thing, and each has its own entry in the TRACKING group of the sidebar: Mentions, Trends, Entities, Categories and Publishers. This guide covers what you can track, what the counts and the mentions quota mean, and the fastest ways to start tracking something.

#What you can track

The four right-hand items in the TRACKING group are the things you put on your radar. Mentions, the first item, is the output — the stream of Discover activity your tracked items produce. Each of the four is a lens on the same feed:

• Entities — a specific person, company, place, event or product from the Knowledge Graph. Track your brand, a competitor, a founder, a product line. This is the workhorse for PR and competitive monitoring.
• Trends — a cluster of articles about one evolving story. Track a trend to follow a storyline as it gains or loses momentum, rather than a single named thing.
• Categories — a Google category (the taxonomy Discover articles are classified into). Track a category to watch a whole content area — say, Personal Finance or Football — in your markets.
• Publishers — a domain/source that appears in Discover. Track a publisher to follow a competitor's or partner's presence in the feed and its share of impressions.

Everything you track is scoped to the current project and its markets. The project switcher in the top bar shows the project name and how many countries it covers; if you switch projects, you switch to that project's tracked items and its own counts.

#What the counts mean

Every item in the TRACKING group shows a live count next to its label. For Trends, Entities, Categories and Publishers, the count is simply how many things of that kind you are currently tracking in this project — track a third competitor and the Entities count ticks from 2 to 3. It is a running tally of your radar, not a measure of activity.

Mentions is different: it shows a quota, rendered as a fraction like 0/20. The first number is how many mentions you've used; the second is your plan's ceiling. That distinction — a count of tracked items versus a quota of mentions — is the key to understanding how tracking is metered.

#How tracked items drive Mentions

A mention is a single instance of one of your tracked items showing up in the Discover feed — for example, an article that names a tracked entity, belongs to a tracked category, or is published by a tracked publisher. As the project polls Discover and analyzes new articles, anything that matches something on your radar is recorded as a mention and surfaces in the Mentions view under TRACKING.

This is why the Mentions label carries a quota. Tracked items are the inputs; mentions are the metered output. The more you track — and the more active those items are in the feed — the faster mentions accumulate against the quota shown as 0/20. When you approach or hit the ceiling, tracking more items won't surface new mentions until the quota resets or you move to a plan with more headroom.

#How tracking powers alerts and dashboards

Tracking is what makes the rest of the project proactive instead of something you have to remember to check.

#Alerts

Because the project already knows what you're watching, it can tell you when something changes — a new mention of a tracked entity, a tracked trend gaining momentum, a tracked publisher surging in the feed. Those notifications surface on the bell in the top bar. If you aren't tracking anything, there's nothing for alerts to fire on; your tracked list is the set of things worth being interrupted for.

#Dashboards

The Mentions view and the per-kind Trends, Entities, Categories and Publishers views under TRACKING are dashboards over your radar rather than the whole feed. They let you follow just your tracked items — their mentions over time, their momentum and their share of the feed — without the noise of everything else the Explorer shows.

#Start tracking something

You rarely add a tracked item from scratch. The natural flow is to find the thing first — in the Explorer, in global search, or on a detail page — and then track it from there.

#From the Explorer or global search

1. Find the thing you want to watch
   Open Explorer under ANALYSIS and set the market and time window, or use the global search box in the top bar (Find a trend, entity or publication) to jump straight to a specific entity, trend or publisher. In the Explorer, the right rail's Top entities, Top publishers and Top trends lists are a good place to spot something worth tracking.
2. Open its detail
   Click through to the entity, trend, category or publisher you care about to open its detail view. This is where you confirm you've got the right thing before you commit it to your radar.
3. Add it to tracking
   Track the item from its detail view. It's now on your radar for this project, the matching count in the TRACKING group ticks up, and new matches begin flowing into Mentions.
4. Watch it under TRACKING
   Open the matching view under TRACKING — Entities, Trends, Categories or Publishers — to confirm it's listed, then use Mentions to follow its activity over time.

#From an entity or trend detail

When you're already reading an entity or trend detail — after clicking a row in the Explorer's publications table or a name in the right rail — you can track it in place without leaving the page. This is usually the quickest path: you've just decided the thing is worth following, so you put it on the radar right there.

#Where to go next