Irrelevant results

Sometimes, users experience getting irrelevant results. In this section, we'll try to figure out what the reason could be.

Keyword phrases

When we specify a keyword that consists of two or more words (keyword phrase), we usually want to get results featuring the exact match in the same exact order.
For example, smm tool.

But in the timeline, we see results such as "I've started doing SMM. Suggest any tool, please." As you might've noticed, both words of our keyword are in there, but they are located in different sentences and are separated by other words.

That is why when we use keyword phrases - keywords which consist of two or more words - we should add quotes (" ") - a search operator used when searching for a specific word combination or an exact phrase (learn more in the Keyword formats article).

Note that quotation marks allow punctuation in between the words (e.g., SMM, tool).

Whenever you need a 100% exact match without any characters in between the words, you should also add the plus (+) operator.

+” ” -  special characters and punctuation of your keyword are preserved (this is normally ignored) but lower and upper cases are ignored.

General keywords

Another frequent problem concerns results for general keywords. Often people receive lots of mentions which are not relevant to their keyword. For example, your brand name is "Daddy & Sons", and your company specializes in producing wooden furniture. But, unfortunately, the brand name is not unique and there is also a company called "Daddy & Sons", but they own a pizza restaurant. As a result, we receive lots of irrelevant mentions, which we need to sort out manually. What can be done in this case?

First of all, we suggest using negative keywords, so that results containing any of the specified excluded keywords next to your main keywords are not collected. Obviously, we should use "pizza" and "restaurant" as excluded keywords for the example mentioned above.

Unfortunately, we may still get a lot of "trash", e.g., posts from social accounts that promote other companies instead of yours. Then you can add those accounts to the Blacklist.

From the get-go, you might not create a perfect search query and we always recommend following these simple steps:

1. Create the most specific request you can.

2. Analyze the first results and blacklist irrelevant sources.

3. Return to the alert settings and modify the search to exclude irrelevant results.

Pro tip: learn how to create requests in Boolean Search and get the most out of Awario! ;)