Brandwatch is a powerful tool for uncovering what consumers are saying online, offering companies a window into audience sentiment, trends, and competitive movements. But when applying it to brand portfolio analysis – where multiple brands under the same parent company need to be tracked in parallel – the platform can fall short without the right approach.

Here’s why:

1. Overlapping Mentions and Brand Confusion

Consumers don’t always speak about brands with perfect clarity. They abbreviate, use nicknames, or reference product types instead of brand names. This becomes a problem when multiple brands in your portfolio share similar product categories or even names. For example, if Brand A and Brand B both sell protein bars under a shared house brand, distinguishing which brand is being referenced in social conversations can be messy without highly specific query logic.

2. No Built-In Brand Architecture Support

Brandwatch is designed to track topics and entities, but not necessarily to reflect a company’s brand architecture. If your organization operates with house-of-brands or endorsed-brand strategies, organizing the hierarchy inside Brandwatch requires manual setup, tagging, and logic. Without careful planning, this can create a fragmented view of the larger portfolio.

3. Tagging and Labelling Challenges

Custom tags are vital in multi-brand studies to organize content by brand, sentiment, campaign, and channel. But in brand portfolio tracking, even experienced teams struggle with sudden inconsistencies due to tag overlaps, unclear rules, or manual tagging errors – which can skew the final analysis.

4. Volume Disparities Between Brands

When one brand in the portfolio has significantly higher mention volume than others, it can dominate dashboards and create misleading results. Without normalization or weighting, this can lead teams to over-prioritize high-volume brands, even if smaller brands are having more meaningful conversations or facing critical issues.

5. Lack of Strategic Guidance

Finally, Brandwatch – like many DIY research tools – provides a powerful engine, but not always a roadmap. Without strategic guidance, teams risk focusing on surface metrics or misinterpreting the data when trying to apply it to real-world portfolio strategy. That’s where the support of insights professionals comes in, helping create frameworks and models that preserve clarity and business relevance.

If your social listening feels noisy or overwhelming when tracking multiple brands, you’re not alone. Many companies using Brandwatch for the first time quickly realize that portfolio analysis requires added strategy, structure, and expertise to avoid losing sight of what matters most.

Designing a brand portfolio study in Brandwatch can be deceptively complex. From the outside, it might seem like a matter of plugging in a few brand names and watching the insights roll in. But in reality, the way a study is structured has a huge effect on what data you collect – and how useful that data ends up being. Here are some of the most common pitfalls we see insights teams make when working with Brandwatch to track multiple brands at once:

Trying to Build One Query for All Brands

It’s tempting to save time with an aggregate search that includes every brand in a single query. The problem? It quickly becomes difficult to organize the data brand-by-brand. You lose visibility into brand-level performance, making it difficult to isolate key differences, sentiment trends, or campaign feedback. Instead, each brand should have its own carefully tailored query – one that reflects its unique language, competitors, and audience behaviors.

Skipping the Planning Phase

Jumping into Brandwatch without defining your goals and brand roles first is a recipe for messy data. Are you comparing brand health across products? Looking for whitespace in a category? Or understanding how a new acquisition fits within your existing portfolio? Each purpose calls for a different setup. Planning your taxonomy, tagging logic, and reporting structure upfront helps you avoid confusion and ensures your research stays aligned to business goals.

Inconsistent Tagging and Categorization

Tagging is where a lot of Brandwatch studies go off course. Without consistent taxonomies (shared definitions for brand roles, campaign types, or product lines), your dashboard ends up mixing apples and oranges. Make sure everyone involved in the project – whether it’s internal teams or external support – follows the same tagging protocols from day one.

Forgetting to Account for Brand Overlap

Many brands within a portfolio share spaces – whether it's online retail, influencer partnerships, or common campaigns. This leads to double-counting or confusion unless the study design explicitly accounts for it. Using inclusion/exclusion logic, custom filters, or even human review can help avoid overlapping mentions muddying the analysis.

Not Using Expert Support When Needed

DIY tools can be incredibly efficient – but only when used with the right know-how. Teams new to Brandwatch or social listening often lack the deep experience needed to configure studies correctly. Bringing in On Demand Talent for setup, tagging frameworks, or mentorship can dramatically improve both the speed and quality of your results. Unlike temporary hires or freelance platforms, these professionals are aligned to your goals and can integrate quickly, without sacrificing quality.

• Misaligned study purpose
• Overcomplicated or unsegmented queries
• Poor metadata tagging
• Inconsistent definitions of success
• Lack of post-launch data review processes

Avoiding these common Brandwatch research mistakes can save your team time, reduce noise, and lead to stronger brand insights across your portfolio. And with guidance from experienced experts, it’s possible to transform your DIY tool into a strategic engine for portfolio growth.

One of the most common problems with portfolio analysis in Brandwatch is brand overlap – when discussion about one brand gets tangled with another. This is especially tricky in multi-brand organizations where products or sub-brands share similar names, visuals, or are used interchangeably by consumers. Without intentional setup, insights teams can end up with muddy data that’s hard to filter or act on.

To maintain clean, accurate results, clarity must start at the study design level. Brandwatch is a powerful social listening tool, but it doesn’t know your brand architecture unless you tell it.

Develop Distinct Queries for Each Brand

Begin by building precise Boolean queries that reflect each brand’s unique language. This can include product names, hashtags, and typical consumer language. Avoid grouping similar brands under one umbrella – even if they’re in the same category – unless you’ve structured your categories to allow for intentional comparison.

For example, a fictional beverage company tracking three sparkling water brands may hear users referencing them together (“I love Brand A and Brand B”). Without filters, this comment might be double-counted or misattributed. Creating specific exclusion rules helps protect the integrity of each brand’s data.

Tagging and Rule Management Is Critical

Effective use of Brandwatch’s Rule Manager allows you to tag content not just by brand, but also sentiment, themes, and intent. This creates clean tags that align with each brand’s role, saving hours of manual sorting later.

• Create clear tag hierarchies that map back to your portfolio strategy
• Use Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify unique terms
• Set rules to prioritize context (e.g., when “XYZ” refers to a flavor vs. a competitor)

Test for Gray Area Scenarios

Before deploying, pressure-test your queries and tagging by sampling edge cases. How does Brandwatch handle shared terms? What happens if your brands are mentioned together in consumer complaints or praise posts?

Taking time to fine-tune these areas ensures your brand analysis doesn’t suffer from ambiguous data – and that stakeholders can trust the results.

If doing this sounds like a lot of upfront work, it’s because it is – unless you bring in expert support. That’s where experienced professionals can step in to audit your current setup, clean up your tags, and ensure your analysis stays laser-focused.

While tools like Brandwatch promise a do-it-yourself approach to consumer insights, the reality is that setting up an effective multi-brand tracking study requires more than basic keyword skills. Understanding market signals, crafting smart Boolean logic, and building queries that reflect real-world brand perception isn’t something that can be fully automated – it takes strategic expertise.

Without experienced oversight, it's easy for organizations to fall into common Brandwatch research mistakes such as:

• Overgeneralized queries that lump brands together
• Misclassified sentiment or mentions
• Missed opportunities to surface category-level insights

This is why many top-performing insights teams are complementing their Brandwatch investments with seasoned professionals who know how to translate data into action.

Experts Translate Business Questions Into the Right Brandwatch Setup

A consumer behavior expert can take your team’s questions – such as “How are Brand X and Brand Y perceived among Gen Z compared to competitors?” – and turn them into properly structured filters, dashboards, and themes. This ensures that your Brandwatch setup mirrors your real priorities instead of producing generic output.

Efficiency Without Quality Trade-Offs

In the rush to move fast with DIY research tools, it's tempting to skip essential steps. But rushing often leads to mistaken conclusions or time-consuming rework. Bringing in expert help prevents this. Rather than sacrificing accuracy for speed, professionals help you gain both.

Short-Term or Long-Term – The Support Can Be Flexible

You may need an audit of your Brandwatch approach or some extra hands during a high-demand season. Rather than outsourcing full studies or hiring permanently, flexible expert support gives you the best of both – immediate skill access, without long-term costs.

These experts not only help run the tool; they make sure it aligns with your wider market research goals and delivers insights that matter to your brand strategy. And perhaps one of the key assets they bring? Teaching your team how to use Brandwatch even better for the long haul.

When working with advanced market research tools like Brandwatch, teams often find themselves stuck between two extremes – managing complex studies alone or turning to freelance platforms for help. But both options come with their challenges.

DIY teams frequently miss key insights or misinterpret data due to limited bandwidth or lack of specific technical skills. On the other hand, freelancers – while offering flexibility – can vary widely in quality, may not have relevant brand or industry experience, and often lack integration with the broader portfolio strategy.

On Demand Talent Gives You a Better Way Forward

SIVO’s On Demand Talent bridges this gap by offering flexible access to seasoned insights professionals – people who’ve solved real-world research challenges across industries. These are not junior analysts or generalist freelancers. They’re vetted experts who can jump into your Brandwatch study and make an impact from day one.

Unlike traditional consultants or short-term hires, On Demand Talent is fast to onboard and trained to fit seamlessly into your team culture, workflows, and strategic goals.

A Smarter, Scalable Solution

Hiring full-time talent takes time and budget. Delivering a project to an agency can remove visibility and flexibility. With On Demand Talent, you gain:

• Hands-on experts with specific Brandwatch experience
• Quick-start support – often ready in days, not months
• Strategic guidance that goes beyond setup to interpretation
• Capability-building – so your team gets stronger

For example, let’s say you’re managing a multi-brand study across global regions with an upcoming product launch. An On Demand Talent expert can help streamline your tagging setup, enrich your audience segments, and create tailored dashboards – helping ensure actionable, executive-ready insights in time for your go-to-market deadline.

In a world where social listening is moving fast and budgets are tightening, it's time to rethink what support looks like. The flexibility of DIY shouldn’t mean sacrificing quality – and with On Demand Talent, it doesn’t have to.