What Is Pulsar CORE? Features and Use CasesGuide

Pulsar CORE is an owned channel analytics platform that lets brands, agencies, and enterprise teams measure content performance, track audience growth, and benchmark against competitors across the major social platforms and Google Analytics, all from one interface. It sits inside the wider Pulsar Platform alongside Pulsar TRAC (social listening) and Narratives AI (narrative intelligence).

Published 21 May 2026 | Last updated 21 May 2026 with the May 2026 Workspaces rollout, TikTok integration, and Google Analytics integration grounded in the Pulsar CORE knowledge base and product documentation.

What Is Pulsar CORE?

Pulsar CORE was launched in April 2015 by Pulsar co-founder Francesco D'Orazio to solve a blind spot in owned analytics: native tools measured branded content in isolation, while real brand performance only made sense when owned, earned, and paid signals were read together. Where Pulsar TRAC watches the conversation happening around a brand, CORE watches the brand's own output: how content is performing, how audiences are growing, and how every channel compares to its competitors.

CORE is built for social media managers, brand and marketing teams, agencies, and enterprise insights teams who need a single dashboard for paid and organic owned-channel performance, plus the public-channel signal to benchmark against competitors, partners, and category leaders.

How Does Pulsar CORE Work?

CORE follows a three-step flow from setup to insight, with all data organised into a Brandset, Brand, and Profile hierarchy.

1. Structure your data: Brandsets, Brands, and Profiles

Every CORE workflow starts with a Brandset, the top-level container. Brandsets group multiple Brands together for side-by-side comparison and reporting; agencies use them to separate clients, enterprise teams use them to separate business units or markets. Each Brand collects individual Profiles (the actual social accounts, for example a specific Instagram handle or YouTube channel). Brands come in two flavours: Owned brands you authenticate to unlock the full metrics set, and Competitor brands you track on publicly available data for benchmarking with no login required.

2. Connect your channels: public tracking or authenticated

Adding a public X, Facebook, or Instagram profile does not require account ownership and works without a login: ideal for competitor tracking. Authenticating a profile via OAuth requires account ownership and unlocks the richer metrics set: demographics, reach, video views, dark posts, Reels, story tap-backs, micro engagements, devices, post times, and spend per post. LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Google Analytics always require authentication. Removing authentication later pauses data collection and is reversible; deleting a profile is permanent.

3. Analyse, benchmark, and export

Once profiles are connected, CORE surfaces a bird's-eye Owned Channel Dashboard, channel-level content performance, audience growth metrics, competitor comparisons, and content strategy recommendations. Teams filter and tag content by campaign, product line, or any custom taxonomy; export the All Posts view to XLS for deeper analysis; export the overview to PDF for stakeholders; and (since May 2026) organise their entire setup inside Workspaces folders with permission control layered on top.

What Channels Does Pulsar CORE Support?

CORE tracks seven channels across social and web analytics. Facebook, Instagram, and X work without authentication. LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Google Analytics require authentication to unlock data. Authenticating any owned channel reveals richer metrics pulled directly from each platform's own API.

Without authentication, CORE collects publicly visible content and powers engagements, Visibility, follower counts, and impression metrics. With authentication, CORE pulls richer data directly from each platform's native API: demographics (age, gender, location, language), reach, video views, story tap-backs, dark posts, Reels, micro engagements, devices, post times, and spend per post. For competitor profiles you don't own, CORE tracks publicly available performance data with no login required. For the wider methodology behind reading these signals well, see Pulsar's primers on audience analysis and the case for audience research beyond demographics.

What Are the Main Features of Pulsar CORE?

CORE ships ten named features that span dashboarding, content analytics, competitor benchmarking, audience tracking, filtering, content strategy, exports, and the three most recent additions: Google Analytics integration, TikTok integration, and Workspaces.

1. Owned Channel Dashboard

What it does: Combines paid and organic data across Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Google Analytics into a single bird's-eye view of content performance and audience growth. Why it matters: Replaces the workflow of stitching native dashboards together with one screen that shows cross-channel performance side by side.

2. Content Performance Analytics (paid, organic, and dark posts)

What it does: Measures every post against engagements, engagement rate, engagements per post, impressions, impressions per post, reach (with authentication), the proprietary Visibility score, and micro engagements. With authentication, CORE also detects paid content automatically, tracks spend per post, surfaces dark posts (boosted content that does not appear on the brand's timeline), separates Reels from feed posts, and monitors AVE to gauge paid vs organic performance. Why it matters: CORE is one of the few tools that shows paid, organic, and dark post performance in the same view alongside competitor benchmarking, so teams can refine strategy and maximise ROI without exporting to a separate paid analytics tool.

3. Competitor Tracking and Benchmarking

What it does: Tracks public channels you don't manage alongside your owned channels, with side-by-side comparisons of audience size, content performance, and growth rate. Why it matters: Gives teams a market benchmark in the same dashboard as their own performance, with no separate competitor tool required.

4. Audience Growth Metrics

What it does: Tracks Total Followers, New Followers (with negative values for net loss), and Growth Rate (new followers divided by days in period) across every connected channel. Why it matters: Shows whether channels are compounding or stagnating, with the same metric definitions applied consistently across platforms that report follower data differently. For the wider playbook on grouping audiences once you can measure them, see Pulsar's guides to audience and community segmentation and the best audience segmentation tools.

5. Filtering and Custom Tagging

What it does: Filters across keywords, target, analytics modules, media type, and source, with custom tags applied by keyword, media type, or source to organise content by campaign, product, format, or any in-house taxonomy. Why it matters: Lets teams slice the same dataset by the categories that matter to their reporting, instead of being locked into platform-default groupings.

6. Content Strategy Insights

What it does: Surfaces actionable recommendations by channel, including best-performing post types, best-performing creatives, the most engaging keywords in copy, and the best-performing formats per platform. Why it matters: Converts performance data into editorial direction, so social and content teams can adjust the weekly calendar based on what is working rather than guesswork.

7. Export and Reporting

What it does: Exports All Posts data to XLS spreadsheets for deeper analysis, exports the overview to PDF for stakeholder share-outs, and ships documented export column definitions in the Intercom help library. Why it matters: Removes the manual-extraction step so analysts can plug CORE data into BI tools, board reports, or client decks without rebuilding the dataset.

8. Google Analytics Integration

What it does: Pulls all website pages into CORE through a direct GA integration, joining web behaviour with social performance in a single interface. Why it matters: Closes the loop between social campaigns and website traffic or conversions, work that would otherwise require two separate platforms and a manual reconciliation step.

9. TikTok Integration

What it does: Adds TikTok as an authenticated channel, surfacing comments, likes, shares, and video views (counted as soon as a video starts playing, with no minimum watch time). Why it matters: Authenticated TikTok profiles reveal data unavailable in native TikTok analytics in isolation, and let teams compare TikTok performance against the rest of the owned channel mix in the same Owned Channel Dashboard.

10. Workspaces (Enterprise, May 2026)

What it does: Adds folder-based organisation and enterprise-grade access control to CORE. Folders are private by default, with a Superadmin, Admin, User, Reader permissions hierarchy, multi-folder Brandset assignment, bulk assignment of existing Brandsets, and folder access assignable at user creation. Why it matters: Built for large agencies managing competing clients and for holding groups with internal data separation requirements, replacing the flat Brandset list with a structure that mirrors how teams actually work. Group-based permissions are next on the roadmap.

What Are the Main Use Cases for Pulsar CORE?

CORE gets hired to do three jobs: save time on reporting, surface creative insights for content strategy, and benchmark performance against competitors. These three jobs map directly to Pulsar's own positioning for CORE: a 360° view of your brand, AI-assisted content performance analysis, and instant competitive benchmarking. Below each job, we list the teams that adopt it most.

1. Time saver for reporting

The problem: social media reporting is slow when data lives across five or six native dashboards. Teams spend hours stitching screenshots and spreadsheets before they can write a single insight.

How CORE solves it: CORE aggregates Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Google Analytics into one view. Teams build, customise, and export reports in minutes rather than hours. The overview exports to PDF for stakeholder share-outs; post-level data exports to XLS for analyst deep-dives. Custom tagging means reports reflect the team's own campaign taxonomy rather than platform-defined categories, and data is collected automatically, so reports don't need to wait on manual pulls.

Who uses it this way: social media managers, agency account teams managing weekly and monthly client reporting, in-house brand teams producing executive dashboards.

2. Creative insights for content strategy

The problem: content teams often rely on gut feel or single-platform data to decide what to post next. Without a cross-channel view of what is actually performing, it is hard to tell whether the issue is the format, the platform, the copy, or the creative.

How CORE solves it: CORE surfaces best and worst performing posts across all channels in a single scannable view, ranked by engagement, Visibility, reach, or engagement rate depending on what the team prioritises. The proprietary Visibility score combines content format, channel, audience size, and engagement into one popularity-and-impact measure, giving a truer signal of content impact than raw engagement counts. CORE then turns the performance signal into editorial direction: content recommendations per channel based on best-performing post types, keyword analysis on copy, image analysis on creatives, and best-time-to-post (with authentication). The result is evidence-based recommendations specific to the brand's own history, not generic best practice. For the broader category playbook these recommendations slot into, see Pulsar's strategy tips to improve your social listening.

"Pulsar CORE has played a significant role in helping us shape our data-driven strategy, contributing to us being named the best Instagram in UK retail."

Darren Campbell, Chief Product & Marketing Officer, Dr. Martens

Who uses it this way: content strategists, creative teams, social media managers planning editorial calendars, brand managers reviewing quarterly content performance.

3. Competitor benchmarking

The problem: brands need to know not just how they are performing in absolute terms, but how they compare to competitors. Native platform analytics show only your own data: there is no way to see a competitor's content performance inside Meta Business Suite or LinkedIn Analytics.

How CORE solves it: CORE lets teams add any public social profile alongside their owned channels, with no login required for the competitor accounts. Competitor brands, influencer accounts, partner profiles, and industry leaders all sit inside the same Brandset. Side-by-side comparison visuals show audience size, growth rate, content volume, engagement and engagement rate, Visibility, and best-performing competitor posts across the same time period. Pulsar's sales materials illustrate this with a soft-drinks Brandset that puts Red Bull (owned) next to Coca-Cola (competitor), comparing Total Followers, New Followers, Growth, Impressions, and Engagement Rate at a glance.

Real-world application in sports: Pulsar's @Pulsar_Football account, active since April 2018, publishes regular football social media benchmarking using CORE. Football clubs use the same setup to benchmark social performance against rival clubs, tracking follower growth, engagement rates, and content performance across Instagram, X, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Sport is a natural fit: every club is both a content publisher and a competitor, and fans actively compare which clubs win on social. For more applied patterns across categories, see Pulsar's library of social listening examples.

Who uses it this way: brand managers benchmarking against direct competitors, agencies benchmarking clients against category leaders, sports organisations (football clubs, sports rights holders) tracking rival clubs' social performance, PR and comms teams monitoring how competitor brands are growing their audiences.

How different teams use Pulsar CORE

The same three jobs show up differently depending on the team. Five team-type patterns recur across Pulsar's customer base.

• Social media managers use CORE as the day-to-day reporting and optimisation tool, with single-view dashboards, automatic best/worst content surfacing, and content suggestions per channel that cut planning time.
• Brand and marketing teams benchmark performance against competitors side by side, monitor audience growth across channels, and connect social campaign performance to website traffic via the Google Analytics integration.
• Agencies manage multiple client Brandsets from a single platform, organise clients into access-controlled Workspaces folders to prevent cross-client data visibility, and deliver competitor benchmarking as part of standard client reporting.
• Enterprise and holding groups separate business units, markets, or brand portfolios using Workspaces folders, assign folder access at user level, and use bulk Brandset assignment for large-scale migrations from legacy setups.
• Sports organisations track club social media performance across all channels in one view, benchmark against rival clubs, monitor audience growth during transfer windows and match weeks, and identify which formats (match highlights, behind-the-scenes, player content) drive the most engagement on each platform.

How Is Pulsar CORE Different From Native Platform Analytics?

Native platform analytics (Meta Business Suite, LinkedIn Analytics, YouTube Studio) are deep on a single channel and shallow across channels. CORE inverts that: it ingests native data through the same APIs, then layers cross-channel comparison, competitor tracking, and a proprietary impact score on top.

One dashboard for every channel. Meta Business Suite is excellent for Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn Analytics for LinkedIn, YouTube Studio for YouTube. None of them show all seven channels side by side. CORE does, including Google Analytics web data in the same interface as social.

Competitor benchmarking built in. Native tools only show you your own accounts. CORE tracks competitor brands as public Profiles inside the same Brandset, so audience size, content performance, and growth rate sit alongside your own as comparable columns.

Visibility score, not just volume. CORE's proprietary Visibility metric combines content format, channel, audience size, and engagement volume into a single popularity-and-impact score. That makes it possible to compare the impact of an Instagram Reel against a LinkedIn post against a YouTube short on the same numerical scale.

Social-plus-web in one place. The Google Analytics integration pulls website pages into CORE, so a social manager can see whether a campaign drove sessions and conversions without leaving the dashboard. Native social tools stop at the platform boundary.

Paid, organic, and dark posts in one view. CORE is one of the few tools that shows paid, organic, and dark post performance in the same view alongside competitor benchmarking. Authentication unlocks automatic paid detection, spend per post, and AVE monitoring, so teams refine paid vs organic strategy without exporting into a separate ad analytics tool.

Enterprise access control via Workspaces. Native dashboards have no concept of agency folders, client separation, or holding-group data isolation. CORE's Workspaces layer (May 2026) makes that structural, with private folders by default and a four-tier permissions hierarchy.

Built by a research agency, not a dashboard vendor. Pulsar is the only social media listening platform built by a research agency, with a full insight team that leads analysis. That heritage shows up in CORE as qualitative-plus-quantitative reads (best-performing creatives surfaced visually, image analysis, keyword analysis on copy) rather than dashboards of raw counts. CORE is trusted by Fortune 1000 brands across agencies, automotive, education and government, media and entertainment, fashion and beauty, finance, food and drink, health, non-profit, sport, technology, and travel, with named clients including Dr. Martens (quoted above), Mazda, and Polaroid.

What's New in Pulsar CORE?

Three additions in 2025 and 2026 have reshaped what CORE measures and who it is built for.

Workspaces comes to CORE (May 2026)

The biggest recent release. Pulsar Workspaces extends the Workspaces feature (originally launched in TRAC in February 2026) to CORE, bringing folder-based Brandset organisation and enterprise-grade access control to owned channel analytics for the first time. Folders are private by default; the permissions hierarchy runs Superadmin, Admin, User, Reader, with folder-level access layered on top; Brandsets can be assigned to multiple folders at once, and bulk assignment is supported for large-scale migrations. The feature is particularly valuable for large agencies managing competing brands and for holding groups with strict internal data-separation requirements. Group-based permissions are coming next.

TikTok in CORE

TikTok is available as an authenticated channel, surfacing comments, likes, shares, and video views from the platform's own API. View counts begin as soon as a video starts playing, with no minimum watch time. The practical advantage: authenticated TikTok profiles inside CORE reveal data unavailable in native TikTok analytics in isolation, and let teams compare TikTok performance against the rest of the channel mix in the same Owned Channel Dashboard.

Google Analytics integration

A direct GA integration pulls every website page into CORE, joining owned social and owned web inside the same interface. Teams can see how social campaigns drive website traffic and conversions in one place, work that previously required separate platforms and manual reconciliation. The integration also opens the door for brand teams to credit social spend with downstream web outcomes inside the same report.

How Does Pulsar CORE Fit Into the Wider Pulsar Platform?

CORE is the owned-channel layer of the Pulsar Platform. Where CORE measures your own content, the rest of the platform handles the conversation, narratives, and risks happening around your brand.

How Much Does Pulsar CORE Cost?

Pulsar CORE is priced on an enterprise basis. There is no published tier list and no self-serve checkout. Quotes are configured per contract based on team size, the number of Brandsets and connected Profiles, channel coverage, and the level of support and integrations required. To get an accurate quote, contact Pulsar for a tailored proposal or book a demo to see CORE applied to your channels.

Frequently Asked Questions About Pulsar CORE

Sources

• Pulsar CORE: product page, first-party feature and channel coverage details
• Pulsar TRAC: companion social listening product
• Pulsar Narratives AI: narrative detection and tracking
• Pulsar Crisis Oracle: predictive brand crisis intelligence
• Pulsar Workspaces on CORE: May 2026 product announcement covering folder-based access control, permissions hierarchy, and roadmap for group-based permissions
• Pulsar CORE Help Center: first-party product documentation for profile management, filtering, tagging, export options, and metric definitions
• CORE Glossary: definitive metric definitions used in this guide
• TikTok in CORE: TikTok integration release notes
• Google Analytics in CORE: GA integration documentation

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