How to Plan, Track and Evaluate Campaigns with Audience Intelligence
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Pulsar Power Up: Campaign Planning and Evaluation
Many people think managing a successful campaign starts at launch. Well, they're wrong. It begins with understanding your audience, the cultural moment you’re entering, and what’s already being said. In this Power Up session, we explored how Pulsar can support each stage of the campaign journey, from planning and tracking to evaluation and reporting, using real-time data, audience insights, and smart visualisation. Let's dive in!
Why audience intelligence matters even before the creative brief
Campaigns are designed to shift attention towards your brand - successful ones influence culture, shift sentiment, or reach new people. But to achieve that, you first need to know what’s already happening. Can you create a successful campaign if you don't know the answers to questions like: What are people saying about the issue you’re focused on? What language do they use? Which platforms are they active on, and what do they care about?
This is where audience intelligence comes in. By using Pulsar TRAC to map conversations, explore content trends, and identify gaps, brands can build creative and strategy that actually aligns with audience reality, rather than pre-conceived assumptions.
Three ways to define your research scope
When planning your campaign in Pulsar, there are three effective places to start:
- Track a category conversation to understand what’s resonating, who’s winning attention, and what themes are trending.
- Analyse a competitor campaign to see what worked (or didn’t), and how consumers reacted to messaging or creative choices.
- Map your target audience using TRAC to create a panel or subreddit search to uncover what they talk about, how they behave online, and which formats cut through.
TRAC supports all three workflows, and with historical data available, you can even go back and evaluate the life cycle of a past activation.
Building dashboards that answer campaign questions
Once you’ve defined your scope, it’s time to translate that into a dashboard that gives you actionable insight. Pulsar TRAC's dashboards can be built using custom or templated charts that help you answer essential campaign planning questions. You can identify where the conversation is happening, when engagement peaks, who the most influential voices are, what kind of content is drawing attention, and which themes are starting to emerge that you might want to build on or avoid.
You can also filter data by audience segments, location, sentiment, or specific platforms to understand how different groups are engaging. Data visualisations like Pulsar’s audience network graph and volume over time charts help you make smarter decisions about where and when to activate.
If the audience is tightly connected, one burst of paid media could travel organically. If communities are fragmented, you may need phased spend across platforms. Similarly, if the category conversation peaks mid-week and dies at weekends, don’t waste your budget pushing posts on a Sunday.
Track live campaigns with alerts and email digests
Once your campaign is live, TRAC helps you monitor it in real-time. Set up alerts for volume spikes, sentiment changes, or specific keyword triggers. Email digests let you share daily summaries with stakeholders, including top-performing posts and an AI-written summary of what’s happening.
Evaluating success - campaign reporting made easy
After your campaign ends, Pulsar makes it easy to report back. Snapshot dashboards quickly surface key metrics including total volume and reach, engagement and sentiment, top-performing posts and influencers, and which platforms and communities drove the most impact. These insights make it simple to assess overall performance and share tangible outcomes with stakeholders.
Want to go deeper? Use custom charts to benchmark campaign mentions against overall brand volume, or segment by location to show geographic spread. If you use Pulsar TRAC, you can also compare pre- and post-campaign audiences to show which groups you reached, and how your follower makeup has changed.
From planning to proof: why audience intelligence powers better campaigns
Audience intelligence gives marketers the visibility and confidence to plan smarter, launch stronger, and evaluate clearly. Instead of relying on gut instinct or post-campaign guesswork, you’re building strategy around real-time behavioural data.
That means more relevant creative, better use of budget, and ultimately, more effective campaigns that hit the mark. To learn more, watch the full recording below.
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Watch the full recording of Pulsar Powerup: Campaign Planning and Evaluation below.
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