Whether you’re in SEO, marketing, or running a business, keeping an eye on what’s being said about your brand online can make all the difference to your reputation. Tracking mentions manually, however, can be time-consuming and lead to missed conversations. And let’s face it – most mention-tracking software is pricey and often lacks flexibility.
Here’s where automation comes to the rescue!
In this guide, Mat Parkins, an expert in AI & automation and the CEO of The AI Guys, shares his tips on setting up a customizable and budget-friendly workflow for tracking brand mentions.
Mat used the following tools, which you’ll need to access to get started:
- Make: a visual automation platform that integrates multiple tools into seamless workflows.
- Content Analysis API from DataForSEO: a solution designed for collecting brand mentions and sentiment data from various sources.
- Claude: an AI assistant built by Anthropic that will help us create structured, easy-to-read email reports with daily mentions summaries.
- Gmail: an email service provided by Google that can send daily reports directly to your or your team’s inbox.
- Airtable: a low-code cloud database perfect for storing data and tracking trends.
This setup will allow you to effortlessly receive brand mention reports via email, gain valuable insights into your mention sources, and promptly act on these insights.
How This Automation Works and Why It’s a Game-Changer
With a quick and easy setup in Make, this automation simplifies data collection and covers all brand mention tracking aspects in one go.
The workflow connects DataForSEO API, Claude AI, Gmail, and Airtable. First, DataForSEO’s Content Analysis API gathers data on brand mentions from various sources and sends them to Claude AI, which generates concise email summaries. These updates are then automatically emailed to you or your team via Gmail. Meanwhile, Airtable logs each mention’s source URL and related data, like domain, content quality score, title, and publication date, helping you track trends and spot patterns over time.
For additional depth, you can modify the automation to pull in the sentiment of your mentions, capturing positive, negative, and neutral tones from DataForSEO’s Content Analysis API response. Powered with natural language processing and machine learning, our API also detects more nuanced emotions like love, happiness, or anger, ensuring you get complete emotional context for each mention in 70+ languages.
Overall, this budget-friendly automation offers numerous advantages: you can quickly respond to customer feedback, identify influential sites in the target niche, and manage brand reputation more efficiently. Each mention is also a potential backlink opportunity, and knowing the emotional context of your mentions, you can create tailored outreach messages to improve your link-building efforts.
Once set up, this brand-tracking workflow can automatically run daily, sending recently discovered mentions straight to your inbox and saving them in Airtable.
Now, let’s dive in and get building.
How to Automate Brand Mention Tracking with DataForSEO API & Make
To start creating your automated brand mentions tracking workflow, watch the video where Mat Parkins shares his insights and follow the steps below.
1. Access Make Platform
Open the Make platform, a visual automation tool. In the following steps, we’ll use it to connect all the tools into one seamless workflow.
➤ Head over to Scenarios and click Create a new Scenario.
2. Integrate DataForSEO Content Analysis API for Mention Tracking
DataForSEO’s API will handle the heavy lifting of finding and analyzing the mentions of your brand across various platforms (blogs, ecommerce and news sites, etc.).
➤ In the new Scenario you created in Make, click the heavy plus bubble and search for DataForSEO – Make an API Call.
➤ Configure the Connection by entering and saving your DataForSEO API login and password.
➤ In the URL field, enter a relative path of the endpoint as in the example: /content_analysis/search/live
➤ Select the POST Method. Then, fill in the Body field with the JSON code based on DataForSEO documentation, replacing the variables as needed:
You can use the DataForSEO API Playground to configure the necessary request parameters and filters via a user-friendly interface and just copy the request from within --data-raw 'PART_TO_COPY'.
When you paste your request body into the module, click OK.
3. Use Claude to Draft Email Reports
Claude AI will take the data from the API request results and format it into a clear, easy-to-digest email.
➤ Click the Plus (+) to add a new module, and search for Anthropic Claude – Create a Prompt.
➤ Select an existing Connection to this platform or create a new one.
➤ Choose the preferred AI model to draft your email.
➤ Indicate the maximum number of tokens as needed.
➤ In the Role field, select User.
➤ Under Content, in the Type field, set Text.
➤ Then, in the Text field below, insert your prompt. Feel free to use our example and modify it as needed:
Here are the 10 most recent mentions of our brand. We need you to take these and create an email to the marketing manager letting them know. YOUR_MAPPED_FIELDS Create the email in HTML, hyperlink text to keep it tidy. The text can be the company website. Only export the HTML, nothing else.
➤ Be sure to replace your YOUR_MAPPED_FIELDS with the necessary fields from the DataForSEO API response as in the example. To map your fields, click on the DataForSEO module, and select Run this module only.
➤ Once the data is pulled in, get back to the Claude module and map the necessary response parameters to the Text field structured as follows:
1. Body.tasks [ ]: result [ ]: items [ 1 ]: url
➤ Replace the number after items with numbers from 1 to 10 corresponding to the number of mentions you wish to collect.
➤ Click OK.
4. Send Daily Reports via Gmail
This step ensures your team always stays in the loop with daily email notifications summarizing your recent brand mentions.
➤ Add Gmail – Send an email as the next module.
➤ Select or create a Connection to your Google Account.
➤ Under To – Email address, enter the intended recipient’s email.
➤ Fill in the Subject field as needed, such as New mentions.
➤ In the Content field, map the Text Response from Claude.
➤ Click OK.
5. Store Mentions in Airtable for Deeper Analysis
Storing the data in Airtable allows you to have a historical record of brand mentions, spot trends, and track changes over time.
➤ First, add a new Flow Control – Iterator module.
➤ In the Array field, map the items array from the DataForSEO API response structured as follows:
1. Body.tasks [ ]: result [ ]: items
➤ Add a new module by searching for Airtable – Create a Record.
➤ Select or create a Connection to your Airtable account.
➤ Choose the necessary Base and Table.
➤ In the bottom panel of the Scenario, click Run once.
➤ Once the data comes through, go back to the Airtable module and map the fields from the DataForSEO API response to the corresponding fields in your table that appear under Record.
➤ Click OK.
That’s it. At this point, you can save the scenario by clicking the Save button on the bottom panel. You can also click Schedule Settings on the bottom panel and schedule a daily Run. Don’t forget to toggle the Scheduling switch to ON.
Now you can enjoy the most recent mentions reports regularly delivered to your inbox and stored for you in Airtable, with no hassle, and at a low cost.
Wrap-Up
By combining the power of Content Analysis API, Claude AI, Gmail, and Airtable thanks to Make, you now have a tailored system for monitoring and analyzing brand mentions without breaking the bank. Running in the background, this automation helps you maintain a strong online reputation, capitalize on link-building opportunities, and respond to feedback with a deep understanding of its context and sentiment.
Claim two months of Make Pro Plan for free to try this automation setup now, and start saving valuable time and money!