Prompts

Writing effective prompts

A prompt should read the way a real buyer would type it. Platforms answer a natural question very differently from a keyword string, so "what is the best project management tool for small agencies" will produce far more representative answers than "best project management tool". A few guidelines are worth following.

• Write full questions in natural language, in the language of the monitor that runs them.
• Prefer the questions your buyers ask before they know your name, such as category and comparison questions, over questions that already contain your brand.
• Include a handful of branded prompts as well, so you may see how the platforms describe you when asked directly.
• Keep each prompt to a single question. An platform answers a compound question unpredictably, and the resulting mentions are harder to interpret.

Typically, a healthy project mixes category questions ("what is the best X"), comparison questions ("X vs Y"), and use-case questions ("how do I solve Z"), and uses tags to keep the groups apart in the analytics.

Active and inactive prompts

Each prompt may be active or inactive. An inactive prompt stops running immediately but keeps its history, so its past responses continue to appear in your analytics for the periods in which it ran. Deactivating prompts is the natural way to rotate a limited prompt quota across a larger question set.

Editing and deleting prompts

You should think of a prompt as a measurement instrument: changing its wording changes what it measures. If you rewrite a prompt substantially, the trend line that spans the edit compares answers to two different questions. When the meaning changes, you should create a new prompt and deactivate the old one instead, so each trend stays internally consistent.

Deleting a prompt removes it from your prompt quota. The responses it already collected are retained, so historical charts do not lose data.

Prompts and your plan

The number of prompts you may create across a project is determined by your organization's plan, and each prompt multiplied by each selected platform consumes one response per day from the monthly response quota. See billing for how the quotas fit together.

Next steps

Once your prompts are in place, you may wish to organize them with tags so your analytics can be sliced by theme.