Awario Review 2024: How Good Is This Social Listening Tool?

Awario ReviewPin

Welcome to our Awario review.

Awario is one of our favorite social listening tools. It actively monitors the web for mentions of the keywords that matter most to your business and collates them all in one place.

In this post, we’ll be taking a closer look at everything Awario has to offer. We’ll explore all its features, show you how the app works, discuss what we think its biggest pros and cons are, and much more.

What is Awario?

01 Awario HomepagePin

Awario is a web monitoring tool.

That means it’s constantly crawling the length and breadth of the internet while ‘listening out’ for mentions of whatever keywords you ask it to track.

And yes, I really do mean everywhere on the internet. Social media, YouTube, blog posts, news sites, forums… it checks it all. 

All told, Awario crawls a whopping 13 billion website pages every single day.

And whenever it discovers a new mention of your tracked keywords on any of those pages, it lets you know about it straight away, so you can jump straight into the conversation.

Plus, it also extracts insights from those mentions to enable you to measure things like reach, brand sentiment, and share of voice.

A lot of people use Awario to specifically track their brand mentions so that they can better manage their brand reputation, respond to customer complaints/queries, and measure sentiment.

However, it doesn’t have to be your brand name. You can track pretty much any keyword you want, which opens up a lot of additional use cases.

For example, you could use it for competitive research by tracking mentions of your competitors, or for influencer discovery by monitoring important topics in your industry.

You can even use Awario to discover new sales opportunities thanks to their nifty ‘Leads’ feature (more on that later).

What features does Awario offer?

Awario comes with a lot of useful features. Here are the main ones to know about:

  • Alerts (keyword mentions monitoring)
  • Mentions feed
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Analytics and reports
  • Data export
  • Influencer discovery
  • Leads & social selling
  • Email notifications
  • Boolean search

Next, we’ll take a closer look at each of these Awario features and explore how they work. But first, let’s look at the initial setup process.

Getting started

When you first log in to Awario, you’ll be prompted to select a use case and set up your first Project.

02 Getting Started - ProjectPin

As you can see, you have a few options here for different types of projects. But aside from some minor UI differences, they all do pretty much the same thing. That is to say, track keyword mentions and surface that data in your dashboard.

So to keep things simple, we’ll just click Create an empty project to start from scratch.

The next page you see will be your dashboard:

03 Getting Started - Empty ProjectPin

Right now, ours is empty. But after we set up our first alert (that’s a keyword or group of keywords that you want to track mentions of), it’ll be populated with some useful data.

So let’s go ahead and do that.

Alerts

To start tracking mentions, either click Create alert, or click the + icon next to Mentions in the sidebar.

You’ll then be prompted to Choose an alert mode

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For now, let’s click Standard (we’ll come back to Boolean later).

On the next page, you can enter the keyword(s) you want to track, and Awario will start monitoring the web for mentions of them. 

05 Alerts - StandardPin

You can add multiple keywords to one alert. So if you want to monitor brand mentions, you’ll probably want to add all the variations of your brand name that you imagine people might refer to your business as (including common misspellings), as well as your URL.

Remember: Awario isn’t just for tracking your own brand mentions. If you want, you could add your competitor brand names as keywords in your alerts to uncover competitive insights. Or you could add keywords related to your industry for market research, etc.

There are a few more things you can do when setting up a mention alert. Let’s take a look at them before we move on.

Excluded keywords

Underneath your target keywords, you can add Excluded keywords to your alert, and Awario will filter out results that contain any of those excluded words or phrases.

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This is a really neat feature that comes in especially handy if your brand name is also often used to refer to something else outside of your business.

For example, let’s say you want to track brand mentions of the technology company ‘Apple’. 

There are probably going to be tons of people using the word ‘Apple’ across the web while referring to the fruit, rather than the brand, so your alerts are going to get clogged up with irrelevant mentions

So to fix the problem, you might exclude keywords like ‘fruit’, ‘healthy’, ‘eat’, ‘pie’, etc. in order to filter out the noise and get more accurate results. You get the idea.

Advanced alert settings

Under Advanced alert settings, you can narrow down your mentions search to specific languages, locations, sources, and time periods.

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So for example, if you’re a local business and you’re only interested in finding out how many people are talking about your brand in your local town/city, you can enter it in the Locations box and Awario will filter out mentions that come from anywhere else.

If you click the Sources box, you can specify where on the web you want Awario to pull mentions from:

08 Advanced alert settings - SourcesPin

There are 7 sources to choose from—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Reddit, and News/Blogs—and you can turn any of them off/on for each alert you create.

Whitelists and blacklists

Below the advanced alert settings, you can click Whitelist or Blacklist to further narrow down your alert results.

You can add specific websites or social media accounts to your Whitelist, and Awario will search them for mentions as a priority.

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And if you turn Strict mode on, Awario will only search those domains/profiles and nowhere else.

Adding domains and profiles to your Blacklist has the opposite effect. Mentions from blacklisted sources will be ignored by Awario and filtered out of your results.

10 Whitelists _ Blacklists - Strict modePin

Mentions feed

Once you’ve set up an alert, you can view the results in your Mentions feed, which is accessible through the sidebar:

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The feed updates in real-time so you’ll know instantly as soon as someone mentions your brand/tracked keyword.

You can click on any mention to open up the web page it was posted on in the window on the right. This makes it easy to jump into the conversation straight away.

12 Mentions feed - ClickPin

You’ll also see a handful of icons underneath each mention, which you can click to perform specific actions.

For example, you can add tags to mentions to organize them into folders and keep things organized.

And you can click the star button to prioritize your most important mentions. This will add them to the Starred folder:

13 Mention feed - StarredPin

You can also click the face emoji icon to change the sentiment of the post manually (we’ll talk more about this particular feature later).

To sort through your mentions, you can use Awario’s rich filtering options.

14 Mention feed - filter optionPin

You can group mentions by date or conversation, search for specific keywords, or filter by things like location, sentiment, source, time period, etc.

Our favorite filtering option, though, is reach

Reach tells you how many people saw each mention. So by filtering the results by reach, you can prioritize the most impactful discussions in your feed.

Sentiment analysis

One really cool thing about Awario is that it doesn’t just find mentions, it also analyzes the context of those mentions to work out the Sentiment.

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Every mention in your feed is categorized as either positive, negative, or neutral based on the kind of words/phrases it appears alongside. 

Most of the time, Awario gets it right and correctly determines the sentiment. But if you notice a mention that has been miscategorized, you can change it manually in a couple of clicks.

You can then sort through your mentions by sentiment. 

16 Sentiment analysis - SentimentPin

So for example, if your goal is online reputation management, you might want to filter your feed to only show mentions categorized as ‘negative’, as these are likely bad reviews and pose the greatest risk to your brand reputation. You can then respond to these negative mentions quickly to mitigate the damage.

If you want to track how your overall brand sentiment changes over time, you can see what percentage of your mentions are positive/neutral/negative between different dates in Awario’s Reports section, which we’ll look at next.

Analytics & reports

Under Reports > Mention Statistics, you can keep track of all the important metrics.

17 Analytics _ reports - Mention StatisticsPin

Graphs and visualizations in the mention statistics report show you things like number of mentions over time, brand sentiment, reach, etc.

You can also see data about the authors of your mentions, like their gender, age, countries, account types, languages, etc.

There’s even a topic cloud that shows you the keywords that most commonly appear alongside your mentions.

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Under Reports > Alert Comparison, you can compare the analytics for two alerts side by side. This is useful for competitive benchmarking and allows you to track and measure your share of voice.

If you want to export your data as a report, click the icon in the top-right and select Download PDF. Awario Enterprise users can also use the white-label feature to add their own branding to the reports.

And you can customize your reports by adding and removing widgets, and dragging and dropping to reorder them on the page.

Influencer discovery

Awario can also be used for influencer discovery. 

Under Reports > Influencers, you can find a running list of all the top influencers that have mentioned your brand or tracked keywords, alongside their audience size, and the sentiment of their mentions.

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You can filter these results by audience size, social network, etc. to find the most impactful influencers on different marketing channels.

If you wanted to, you could then reach out to these influencers to explore collaboration opportunities.

This feature is also useful for finding out who your brand ambassadors are—the loyal customers that help to promote your brand by speaking positively about you to their friends and family—and for prospecting for backlink-building opportunities.

Leads

Leads is one of Awario’s most powerful features.

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Once you set up a Leads alert, Awario will start searching the web for prospects who are looking for products/services like yours, as well as those who are complaining about one of your competitors. These are your social selling opportunities.

Then, it’ll display all these prospects in the app so you can easily reach out to them. And everything updates in real-time, so the minute a new opportunity arises, you’ll know about it.

21 Leads - AlertsPin

This feature alone makes Awario more than worth the monthly subscription cost. It practically pays for itself, given that it can bag you hundreds of sales every month that you might have otherwise missed out on.

Email notifications

If you want, you can set up email notifications to have updates regarding your alerts delivered straight to your inbox.

To turn email alerts on, click the cog icon next to Project in the top navigation bar, then open up your project settings.

22 Email notifications - ProjectPin

On the next window, open the Notifications tab and make sure the toggle next to Email is set to On

23 Email notifications - OnPin

You can click the cog icon next to each individual alert to change the frequency of your alerts (i.e. daily or weekly). 

You also have the option of turning Slack notifications on or off on this page. If you turn them on, you’ll get notified on Slack about new mentions.

Boolean search

One last feature we want to mention is Boolean search.

This is a more sophisticated way to set up mention alerts using Boolean logic operations. It’s useful for users who need more control and have more exacting requirements.

To get started, click the + icon next to Mentions, then when it asks you to Choose an alert mode, select Boolean.

24 Boolean search - Alert modePin

On the next page, you can formulate really specific alert search queries using Boolean operators.

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For example, you can use the ++ operator to search for case-sensitive exact-match keywords.

If you were monitoring brand mentions for the company ‘Apple’, this would come in useful, as it would filter out all mentions of the common noun ‘apple’ that weren’t capitalized.

Or let’s imagine you wanted to find different keyword matches in different data sources, e.g. ‘Apple’ in the news only, and ‘iPhones’ on Twitter only.

In that case, you could write a query like this using FROM operators:

Apple FROM news-blogs UNION “iPhone” FROM Twitter

It sounds technical, but it’s really not that complicated once you learn the different operators and syntax, which Awario lists on the right.

How much does Awario cost?

Awario offers three subscription plans: Starter, Pro, and Enterprise.

The Starter plan costs $39/month (or $24/month billed annually) and includes:

  • 3 monitored topics
  • 30,000 mentions/month
  • 5,000 stored mentions per topic
  • 1 team member
  • Basic features

The Pro plan costs $119/month ($74/month billed annually), and comes with all the same features as Starter, plus:

  • 15 monitored topics
  • 300,000 mentions/month
  • 15,000 stored mentions per topic
  • 10 team members
  • Data exports
  • PDF reports

The Enterprise plan costs $399/month ($249/month billed annually) and gives you everything that comes with Pro, plus:

  • 100 monitored topics
  • 1 million mentions/month
  • 50,000 stored mentions per topic
  • Unlimited team members
  • White-label reports
  • API
  • Account manager

If you need more than that, you can contact Awario for a custom plan tailored to your needs.

You can also try Awario out free with a 7-day free trial (no credit card required). 

Awario pros and cons

Now that we’ve had a chance to explore Awario’s pricing and key features, here’s an overview of what we think its main strengths and weaknesses are.

Awario pros

  • Lots of data sources. Our favorite thing about Awario is how many different web sources it actively monitors. Most social listening tools only track mentions on social media platforms, but Awario looks everywhere. That includes blog posts, online forums, news stories, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook… it even checks video descriptions on YouTube and Vimeo.
  • Large database. Awario doesn’t rely on a single third-party data provider to monitor mentions like most of its competitors do. Instead, it crawls over 13 billion web pages every day and combines that data with APIs, making it one of the most reliable and immediate ways to discover mentions.
  • Super flexible. Awario offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to setting up your mention alerts. Boolean search allows you to find really specific mentions with almost limitless control. And you can set up Awario to track keywords in any language, and in any location.
  • Social selling. We really like Awario’s Leads feature. This is without a doubt one of the platform’s biggest strengths—Awario practically pays for itself with all the sales opportunities this unlocks.
  • Easy to use. The UI makes it easy to find your way around the tool. Awario’s learning curve is negligible.

Awario cons

  • Irritating UI popups. If you don’t connect your Facebook and Instagram accounts, Awario will let you know about it annoyingly often through in-app popups. But if you’re not interested in tracking mentions on Facebook and Instagram, this can be irritating.
  • Sentiment analysis is hit-and-miss. Awario usually gets the sentiment of brand mentions right, but not always. It still miscategorized a good chunk of the mentions it found in our tests, which makes the brand sentiment analytics fairly inaccurate.
  • Not an all-in-one solution. Awario is a dedicated web monitoring tool, so it does that really well—but that’s pretty much all it does. Unlike some of its competitors, it doesn’t have any features to help with other aspects of your marketing efforts, like a social scheduling tool or built-in CRM.

Awario alternatives

Not sold on Awario? There are alternatives on the market but most of them are VERY expensive by comparison.

However, here are two worth checking out:

  • Brand24 | Our review — Brand24 is another web monitoring app that shares a lot of the same features as Awario. It’s marketed as a ‘social listening tool’ but like Awario, it also checks news, blogs, videos, forums, and pretty much everywhere else on the web. It boasts a few advanced features including context word clouds and advanced, AI-powered sentiment analysis.
  • Iconosquare | Our review — This is a good alternative to Awario if you’re looking for more of an all-in-one solution for social media rather than a dedicated monitoring tool. It doesn’t just offer social media monitoring, but also publishing tools so you can schedule social media posts in advance, plus inbox management, reporting, and more. It is, however, primarily focused on Facebook and Instagram.

Final thoughts on Awario

That concludes our in-depth review of Awario. 

All in all, Awario gets top marks from us.

It’s as good as it gets when it comes to web monitoring solutions and gives you everything you need to keep track of your mentions all across the web.

And it has a few unique features that set it apart from its competitors. In particular, the Leads feature is fantastic—you can use it to quickly uncover hundreds, if not thousands, of sales opportunities for your business.

We also really like its reporting capabilities. The ability to surface different widgets on one page depending on what data/metrics you’re interested in is really neat. 

The sentiment analysis isn’t perfect, but it never is, no matter what software you use. And it gets it right most of the time.

Just keep in mind that Awario isn’t an all-in-one solution. 

It makes a good addition to your existing stack if you’re just looking for a dedicated web monitoring tool.

And if you’re still on the fence, we’d suggest taking Awario for a spin so you can see for yourself if it’s a good fit for your needs. Just click the link below to sign up for your 7-day free trial:

While you’re here, you might want to check out our guide on how to build a social media strategy

Or to learn more about the state of social media, check out our roundup of the latest social media statistics.


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