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Getting Started with Classic Dashboards

Learn how to select different Dashboard Widgets to get the best insights from your search results and customize and edit your dashboards.

Cheyenne V. avatar
Written by Cheyenne V.
Updated over 5 months ago

Classic Dashboards are our original dashboards in Analyze. They leverage your Explore searches to pull data into different widgets.

This article will cover:


Requirements

Before building your Classic Dashboard, you must have created at least one Explore saved search. Learn more about Creating a Search in Explore.


Building a Classic Dashboard

Classic Dashboards can be found in the Analyze tab. Follow the below steps to build a Classic Dashboard.

  1. Click Analyze in the left-hand navigation bar

  2. Click Get Started

  3. Scroll to the bottom of your screen and navigate to the Classic Dashboard section

  4. Click Create

  5. Give your dashboard a name

  6. Select Add Widget in the top right-hand corner

  7. Select the widget you’d like to add

  8. Click Add to Dashboard in the bottom right-hand corner

  9. You will then be back at the dashboard’s main page; select Configure on the widget you added

  10. On the right-hand side, a pop-up will appear. Here you can give your widget a new title and adjust settings and filters, such as

    1. Select an Input or multiple Inputs

    2. Select a Chart Type

    3. Change the Label Format

    4. Turn Labels on or off

    5. Change the AVE Value

    6. Select a Currency

    7. Select a Date Granularity

  11. Click Save

  12. Repeat steps 5-9 as needed

Note: You can add up to nine widgets to each Classic Dashboard


Editing and Deleting Widgets

Editing Widgets

  1. Click Analyze in the left-hand navigation bar

  2. Select the Classic Dashboard you want to edit

  3. Select the gear icon in the top right-hand corner

  4. Navigate to the widget you want to edit

  5. Select the gear icon on the widget

  6. A toolbar will pop up on the right-hand side

    1. Via Settings, update the configuration of your widget by selecting each category and changing the options selected.

    2. Via Filters, refine the content being displayed within the widget by Country, Language, or Sentiment.

  7. Click Update

  8. Select Save in the top right-hand corner

Deleting Widgets

  1. Click Analyze in the left-hand navigation bar

  2. Select the Classic Dashboard you want to update

  3. Select the gear icon in the top right-hand corner

  4. Navigate to the widget you want to remove

  5. Select the trash icon

  6. Select OK

  7. Select Save in the top right-hand corner


Customizing Your Dashboard Colors

You can update the colors used on a dashboard to better match your brand and competitors, making it easier to present and export dashboards for reporting.

  1. Click Analyze in the left-hand navigation bar

  2. Select the Classic Dashboard you want to update

  3. Select Actions in the top right-hand corner

  4. Click Set chart colors

  5. Select the current color you’d like to update, edit the color

  6. Select OK

  7. Once all colors have been updated, select OK to save all the changes

Note: Currently, not all widgets support the custom colors, and/or the colors may not be displayed when shared.


Types of Widgets

Most Commonly Used Widgets

Media Exposure

The Media Exposure Widget is our most commonly used Widget. It allows you to analyze the media coverage a particular search is getting over a selected time period.

You can have multiple search inputs in this Widget, as well as the ability to perform year-over-year analysis.

This Media Exposure widget is particularly useful when trying to analyze the volume of media coverage your organization receives in comparison to the amount of social coverage you receive, like in the example below:

Share of Voice

If you need to provide insight into how much media coverage your brand or product gets compared to the competition, Share of Voice is the widget to use.

This widget is one of the most popular among our clients, and results can be displayed in volume or percentage. Filters can also be applied to allow you to focus on specific markets of interest.

Potential Reach

Say you are pitching a new product and start pushing out press releases to influencers and media outlets. You likely want an idea of how many viewers your press release/story reached. This is when the Potential Reach Widget is indispensable.

This widget provides insight into the number of potential viewers that have been exposed to a brand, product, event, or topic over a specified date range. We recommend using potential reach as an indicator of how your brand or company is performing over time rather than assuming X number of people have viewed an article mentioning you.

We get our reach numbers through our partnership with SimilarWeb, which shows the average number of desktop and mobile visitors to a given site your article is on (not the article itself). It is important to note that this is not how many people have read your article.

However, potential reach is a gauge as to the amount of audience you are getting since the thought is that there is a correlation between high-reach publishers and how many visitors actually read your article.

Because of this, the Potential Reach Widget provides insight into the number of potential viewers who have been exposed to a brand, product, event or topic over a specified date range. This will ultimately help you identify the size of your potential audience, as opposed to limiting analysis to the number of articles a brand or product has been mentioned in.

AVE

Many public relations professionals use the Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) Widget to assign a dollar value to media coverage. However, it is important to note that it provides an estimated measure, not an exact value, and for that reason, some choose not to measure with AVE.

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Sentiment

The Sentiment Widget gives insight into how coverage is broken down by positive and negative tonality over time for a brand, product, event, or topic.

Many clients use this Widget to easily identify spikes in negative or positive sentiment and subsequently access the content of interest with a simple click of a button. The Widget works best using one input.

Total Media Exposure

The Total Media Exposure widget highlights your current media coverage with a percent change over a comparison period.

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Geo-Based Widgets

Heat Map

The Heat Map Widget will provide you insight into how coverage is broken down by country and then offer further drill-down capabilities in your main areas of focus. Learn more about Heat Maps.

Volume of coverage is represented by color saturation and thereby helps you understand where a topic is trending geographically. Check out the example below:

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Top Locations

Similar to the Top Languages widget, The Top Locations widget provides insight into how coverage of a brand, product, event, or topic is broken down by country. The widget displays a ranking of the top 10 countries where a topic is covered most frequently and thereby helps you understand in which markets a topic is trending.

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Social-Only Widgets

Social Reach

The Social Reach widget gives insight into the number of potential viewers who have been exposed to a particular message on social media. Reach helps you identify the size of the potential audience and understand what types of messages are most far-reaching in the social media space. The Social Reach widget can display one social input.

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Social Reach vs Social Volume

This Premium Social widget compares the media exposure for social content against the social reach of the post sources. It is currently displayed as two-line graphs. We are also testing a new, more approachable interface with this widget: the settings are displayed as a window instead of a sidebar.

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Top Posters by Reach

See what prominent social profiles and brands are posting about a brand, industry, or competitor. This widget shows the top social profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram that match a given search. This is a widget available to Premium Social Package users.

Note: This widget currently does not include Excel reports and will not be displayed when emailing the dashboard report. However, this widget is included in shared dashboards..

Top Social Posts

The Top Social Posts widget displays a summary of the social content with the highest social reach within a given date range. It can display up to 5 inputs.

Top Posters by Volume

This widget provides insight into how coverage of a brand, product, event, or topic is broken down by posters. The widget displays a ranking of the top 10 posters who share the most content on a topic in any social channel.

Advanced Widgets

Sentiment Score

The Sentiment Score Widget provides insight into how the general tonality of a brand, product, event, or topic develops over time.

At the same time, this Widget benchmarks how tonality is developing within the context of other brands.

Top Language

Let's say you are planning on releasing a product in an emerging market and have been conducting research. You will most likely need to identify the main languages in which your topic of interest is being discussed and the areas where it is generating buzz.

The Top Language widget breaks down documents by language. Therefore, it can be very helpful if you are searching for a topic with a global presence. The widget displays a ranking of the top 10 Languages where a topic is covered most frequently and helps you understand in which Languages a topic is trending.

Top Posters & Top Sources

Many of you pitch to and send information to a very targeted group of influencers or publications in your industry of interest. The Top Posters and Top Sources Widgets will allow you to identify your key audience.

The Top Posters Widget provides insight into how coverage of a brand, product, event, or topic is broken down by posters. The widget displays a ranking of the top 10 posters by their usernames who share the most content on a topic in any social channel.

The Top Sources widget provides insight into how coverage of a brand, product, event, or topic is broken down by media outlet. It displays a ranking of the top 10 sources where a topic is covered most frequently, helping you understand which publications and social channels are trending.

Content Stream

The Content Stream Widget displays a preview of the latest documents from a set of searches, tags, or RSS inputs.

*User Tip: Use Tags to highlight key documents in the Content Stream Widget and show a quick glimpse of important documents while studying the corresponding analytics in your Dashboard.

Image

Some clients like to add photos or image files inside the Dashboard container.

With the Image Widget, you can brand your Dashboard or display images relating to the content of your Widgets. This also works nicely when you are sharing your Dashboard with an executive team or exporting and reporting on your content. Acceptable file formats include jpg, png, and gif images.

Text

The Text Widget simply displays a block of text, which can be added or configured in edit mode.

Some clients use this Widget to describe the purpose of the dashboard or to describe the data being displayed on one or more of the other dashboard Widgets.

This can be useful for Public Relations Professionals who are making a pitch to a prospective client or reporting on their efforts.

Trending Themes

The Trending Themes widget gives you insight into keywords and key phrases that are most frequently associated with a brand, product, event, or topic.

The size of the terms displayed indicates how frequently they are used within your results in comparison to each other. The larger terms have been used more times than the smaller terms.

The widget can also help you identify keywords that you may want to add or remove from the search. It works best with one input.

Take a look at the trending keywords associated with the Summer Olympics in Rio:

Topic Momentum

The Topic Momentum widget is an extension of the Trending Themes widget. It gives insight into key phrases most frequently associated with a brand during a defined period. It provides a real-time comparison of terms in the current period's content (New), the previous period's content (Vanished), and terms reoccurring in both periods (pre-existing). giving you insight into how brand perception changes over time.

*User Tip: Opening the full view of this widget will provide the date ranges of the compared 'current' and 'previous' period in the top left-hand corner

Essentially, the Topic Momentum Widget shows you how the language and terms used around a topic change in the media over time. It can be a useful way to examine changes in brand perception and topics associated with mentions of your brand. This widget works best using one input.

You can customize the enrichments used to display the terms in this widget. These include Key phrases and Concepts.

Enrichment: Key phrases

Key phrase or Terminology Extraction is an automatic method for mining the most important words and phrases from text and is an immense topic in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We won't go into the algorithmic details of how this is done, but it's worth noting that it's not simply the frequency of how often a term occurs in a document that determines whether or not it's a key phrase. Other factors, such as how common a particular word or sequence of words is in the English (or any other) language, are weighed in as well.

So, for instance, if the words 'mobile cake' never occurred together in the past, then even if they occur only once in an article, the algorithm will classify that term as a key phrase. For example, if Key phrase Extractor were to analyze the content of the book Alice in Wonderland, it would find terms like "caterpillar" and "hatter," as well as phrases such as "rabbit hole," "March Hare," "Cheshire Cat," and so on. Key phrases are typically single nouns, noun phrases, or proper names of people, places, or organizations.

Enrichment: Concept

This enrichment classifies “concepts” based on key phrases and themes in Wikipedia. Meltwater has analyzed Wikipedia pages using a proprietary algorithm that finds unique keywords, phrases, and themes. These are then attributed to the Wiki page’s topic and the topic becomes a “concept”. Any document in Meltwater that contains those unique keywords, phrases, and themes will be categorized as that concept.

Google Analytics

The Google Analytics Widget helps you understand the web traffic brought to your website. By linking our content with your website traffic, you will get a clearer picture of what types of articles brought users to your site.

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Learn more about the Google Analytics Widget.

Social Echo

Social Echo helps you understand the real-time number of social shares for any editorial document. This tool provides you with a volume of social media interactions (such as posts, shares, retweets, etc.) with a specific online news article. The Top Social Echo widget displays a ranking of articles with the most social media exposure in a given date range. The widget works with one input or search folder.

Learn more about Social Echo.


FAQs

Which widgets have customizable colors, can shared via shareable dashboards, and also display the custom color?

*The Social Reach widget uses the chart colors to denote the different social sources.


💡 Tip

Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

Find answers and get help from Meltwater Support and Community Experts.


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