As we plan for another new year, we’d like to take the time to review all the features our developers have worked around the clock to release within the News Dashboard. In addition, we offer a quick preview of our roadmap ahead for 2020.

What we added in 2019

Overall

• News Flashboard tool: Created for the #ONA19 conference, this completely free tool helps you get a general idea of your visibility, and even look into competitor data
• News Dashboard offered in additional countries and languages: U.S. (Spanish), Argentina (Spanish), Chile (Spanish), Brazil (Portuguese) and India (English)
• News Dashboard Start Page: Instantly get a view of news visibility today.
• Completely revamped API and better documentation
• URL clusters: In addition to monitoring your visibility by collections of keywords, you can select a certain group of URLs to analyze, either by sub-domain or a portion of the URL
• Keyword Manager: Keyword Cluster names are now editable
• “On-demand” exports through the Export tab

Action View

• “Follow” an article-keyword combination, to see when it ranks and when it loses a ranking 
• “NB” button: Show articles/publishers in the last measured News Box for a keyword (like in Missing Topics)
• Receive alerts from the Action View in Slack and Microsoft Teams 

KPI Dashboard

• Article Focus: Available in the SERP (search engine result page) reports, you can immediately see a list of most visible articles for your filter settings for each publisher.
• Added Desktop Visibility Overall report, to help you monitor Desktop News Boxes, Desktop Video Carousels and Organic rankings on the desktop SERP 
• Added mobile and desktop Video Carousel data in the Mobile and Desktop Visibility Overall reports
• Added option to filter by video rankings in News Boxes, i.e. the “play” icon that can appear on Carousel rankings 
• Google News crawler: We now track the “Headlines” category and the “Beyond the Headlines” box on the Google News homepage
• Exclude incomplete data points in the SERP reports: If you decide to only evaluate the data that is already completed you can check “Only consider completed data points” in the KPI’s filter menus – it’s right below the time frame selection.
• Topic Coverage report improvements: There’s a new drill-down that appears if you click on the number in the column “Indexvalue” in the table below the chart in the Topic Coverage report of the KPI Dashboard. It’s a list of all of your own articles that we found for a keyword in the chosen time frame during our measurements.
• YouTube visibility incorporated in publisher lines: We are now able to split up the visibility of youtube.com and can add the rankings you had with your YouTube videos on the SERP and in Google News to your visibility line.
• Easier selection of multiple keywords in the keyword search: If you type in a keyword in the “Keyword filter” field you will now be able to pick multiple results one after the other without having to type in the keyword again after selecting one out of the list. This makes analyzing multiple specific keywords at once a lot easier.
• Index Rate report renamed from Indexation Rate.
• Last measured SERP rankings (based on the filter settings) in new pop-up in the keyword table of the SERP reports.

What’s on the 2020 News Dashboard roadmap

• Help section, including videos.
• Action View: “Sparkline” showing how long an article remains in the News Box.
• KPI Dashboard: Combined Mobile-Desktop Visibility Overall report.
• Notification Center: View alerts about new keywords and lost rankings in a central location.

What we added in 2018

Google News released an updated version of Google News in mid-2018. We immediately jumped into action, not just making sure the News Dashboard could support the changes, but taking the opportunity to better match our new design features.

• Completely reworked crawler keyword, which automatically pulls out keywords from Google News and Trends.
• Keyword Extractor – which automatically provides many more news topics from Google News to our publishers.
• Revamped News Dashboard API.
• Personal filter options in Action View and KPI Dashboard now match.
• Exports tab: Added daily TSV reports of total article rankings.
• Settings>Admin: Key account contacts can manage their own users in the tool.
• Action View: Added an anti-keyword cannibalization feature to columns Keyword and Ranking in NB.
• Action View: Newsroom now includes mobile and desktop Missing Topics and Lost Rankings.
• Action View: Video Carousels and “ranking as a video”.
• KPI Dashboard: Combined mobile and desktop reports in navigation.
• Google News: Crawl Fact Check and Spotlight sections.
• Google News: Confirmed desktop and mobile results are similar.

Are there any features you’d like to see added to the News Dashboard? Let us know in the comments! And if you’d like to demo the tool for your website, reach out to us via the demo button today.