Once you've done all the hard work of creating and outreaching for a campaign, it's a great feeling to watch the coverage roll in.

I recommend looking for coverage every few hours in the days after sending your pitch.

And remember to check each article for a link - don't assume there will always be one. The sooner you spot unlinked mentions, the quicker you can turn them into a link.

Search engines like Google are the most reliable way to find mentions for your campaign.

Search for specific things like:

You can also combine these things, such as searching for the post title and the brand name together.

For example, if you sent a pitch about the number of failed startups in America with the following subject line, post title, and text:

Brand: JournoFinder / JournoFinder.com

Subject line: 75% of US Startups Fail Within 6 Months

Post title: America's Failed Startups

Expert quote included in pitch: Veronica Fletcher, startup expert at JournoFinder, commented on the findings:

"The invention of AI has made it easier than ever for someone to start a business. Chatbots can provide endless ideas and even a complete business plan...."

I would search for things like:

If you find some articles covering your story, search for the headline they used as well. You'll often see smaller publications pick up stories from bigger publications and using the same headline.

Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases, and boolean operators like AND to refine the searches. These are especially useful if you have a common name.

Also, make sure to adjust the time period for the search. If you only pitched the campaign the day before use the '24 hours' parameter. Or if it's been a few days, use the 'past week' parameter.

Once you find an article, you can look for syndications by searching for the exact headline (on general search, not news search). You will need to scroll to the bottom of the Google results and 'repeat the search with omitted results included' to make sure all the syndications are shown.

If you have a data page, this can continue to attract links well after the initial excitement has died down. For example, a campaign we ran in January 2023 to do with dry January attracted most of it's links in 2024.

Even expert commentary type pitches can attract links later down the line. Journalists sometimes save pitches they like until they have a story where it fits.

So it's well worth setting up alerts for media mentions of your brand and campaigns in the news.

There are two free options for media monitoring:

Google alerts is super easy to set up and takes 2 minutes. You will receive an email when an article matching your search appears in their index.

You can also pick how often you receive the emails. I prefer the 'as it happens option', but you can also get weekly or daily summaries.

The downside to Google alerts is that not every mention or link in guaranteed to end up on Google, so it might miss some mentions.

Talkwalker is also very easy to set up, and the setup form is basically identical to Google Alerts.

The main difference is that talkwalker will also search social platforms like Reddit and Twitter for mentions.

There are also various paid tools you can use, but if you're only running a few campaigns, the free tools will be sufficient.

SEO tools like AHREFs, Moz, Semrush and Majesitic all have their own backlink monitoring tools, and in some cases these tools can find links before they appear on search engines.

AHREFs is proud to be one of the most active crawlers on the web, and is therefore the mostly likely to capture any links.

If you own the site you're monitoring, you can use AHREFs site explorer to view all the links it finds (once you've verified the ownership of your site).

1) Navigate to the site explorer

2) Enter the URL you want to find links to. Here you can enter a specific URL and select 'Exact URL', or you can enter the domain URL and select 'sub domains' to find links any page on the site.

3) Navigate to 'Backlinks'

4) Explore the backlink profile for any you've missed

If you don't own the site, you won't be able to access the site explorer. Instead you'll be limited to the free AHREFs backlink checker.

It works in a similar way, but you only see a sample of the backlinks instead of all of them.

Majestic's backlink checker, Sem Rush's backlink checker, and Moz's backlink checker are all options too.

One obvious downside to using a backlink monitoring tool is that they wont capture any unlinked mentions.

If you included any infographics or unique images in your pitch or data page, searching the web for these can unearth some hidden mentions.

Google image search is good for this.

Here's a sample image search result from my McCheapest campaign:

You can see I get a match, which I can then check and make sure they included a link.

Tinyeye.com is another option.

This is only an option if you have access to Google Analytics for the site you're monitoring.

If you do, navigate to Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition.

Then set the session to 'source / medium' to see traffic from referrals (i.e external links). You can also adjust the time parameters if needed.

You wil get a list of domains that your website has recivived traffic from, but you will only get the main URL.

For example, in the image below you can see there is some traffic coming from mashed.com, but you aren't able to get any more information about the exact page from analytics.

Instead, you need to turn to Google and do a site search.

"site:mashed.com mccheapest"

With 'mccheapest' being the name of the campaign. You might need to try a few different search combinations to find the page with the link.

Bingo!

Note: You'll also be able to see newsletter mentions in Google analytics.