If you use Meltwater, you already know it’s a powerful tool for getting a bird’s-eye view of your coverage, social conversations, competitor activity, and emerging narrative shifts.
It is built for monitoring what is happening and turning that into ongoing intelligence, and it does a great job of that – many CoverageBook customers agree.
But when it is time to send a report to a client, a CMO, or a board member, the question is: which coverage mattered, what did it say about the brand, and what PR work led to it?
Meltwater can provide dashboards, summaries, reporting exports, and metrics.
But the team still needs to select the relevant coverage, explain the significance, and decide how much context the reader needs.
That is what CoverageBook is for.
In this post, you’ll see:
- Why Meltwater’s reporting and CoverageBook’s reporting are built for different parts of the PR workflow
- How CoverageBook’s clip-level Coverage Analysis adds context that a high-level dashboard cannot supply on its own
- How the two tools sit alongside each other for many of our customers
By the end of this article, you’ll have a solid understanding of whether Meltwater and CoverageBook are the tools for your team and where they might fit together.
Why Meltwater’s reporting and CoverageBook’s reporting are different
Meltwater’s job is to bring together a large, changing volume of media and social signals.
That is valuable when the team needs real-time awareness, competitor context, sentiment trends, or a view across markets and channels.
But reporting for clients and stakeholders is usually more selective than that. It needs a curated, on-brand approach.
A client update, a campaign review, or a board report does not necessarily need every mention in a monitored search. It needs the right coverage, the right context, and a clear explanation of the result.
Meltwater gives a PR team the broader picture of what is happening around a brand.
CoverageBook gives the team a place to keep the final, handpicked body of coverage it wants to measure, explain, and reuse.
When we asked CoverageBook customers how they use Meltwater and CoverageBook together, the big theme was this:
“Meltwater finds or monitors it; CoverageBook helps us analyse it.”
One customer described using Meltwater for print and digital coverage, Critical Mention for broadcast, and CoverageBook for analytics.
Another described using Meltwater and Google to monitor and collect coverage with CoverageBook helping to clean up the data.
And those aren’t uncommon for modern PR work: different sources often cover different channels.
That’s not to denigrate any one tool:
The point is not that Meltwater’s monitoring is incomplete or that a team should abandon it. Monitoring and curation are separate jobs. A PR team may need both.
We have deliberately not turned CoverageBook into another monitoring or alert tool. Many PR teams already have a great tool for that part of the workflow.
But once the team has decided which coverage genuinely belongs in the story, CoverageBook gives that selection a proper home.
What CoverageBook does differently from Meltwater’s reporting
Meltwater has substantial reporting capability.
It can provide live dashboards, automated reports, summaries, custom KPIs, competitor comparison, exports, and white-label reporting.
The distinction is not that Meltwater’s reports are less professional. The distinction is whether the reader needs a cross-channel intelligence view or a coverage-first explanation of individual hits.
Meltwater’s reporting is designed to surface overall performance: share of voice, campaign performance, trends, reach or impressions, and competitive movement across monitored data.
But CoverageBook is built around curated coverage at a specific campaign level, showcasing each piece of the coverage without sacrificing the ability to zoom out and look at the big picture for a campaign.
Each selected item can carry its screenshot, headline, outlet, Estimated Views, social and outlet data, and the analysis that turns a clip into something a stakeholder can interpret.
A short brand mention and a feature that puts your brand in the headline are both coverage.
But no-one thinks they’re the same result.
That is where CoverageBook’s Coverage Analysis features help.
- Brand Prominence records how visible the brand was in the coverage and creates a score out of 100. A brand that appears in the headline, imagery, and key messages is clearly more prominent than one named briefly towards the bottom of an article. Both clips may contribute to volume. They should not carry the same strategic weight in a report.
- Sentiment records how the brand was portrayed.
- Coverage Type identifies whether the clip is, for example, a review, roundup, or news story.
- PR Activity connects the clip to the tactic, event, launch, or pitch behind it.
That means the team can answer more than “how much coverage did we get?”
It can show what kind of coverage it earned, how visible the brand was in it, how the brand was portrayed, and which PR activity was linked to the result.
Another way that CoverageBook does things differently is that it uses Estimated Views which gives a much more meaningful number than the widely used AVE.
A publisher’s monthly traffic is useful context. But it is not the same thing as the number of people who saw one article on that publisher’s site.
CoverageBook’s Estimated Views is a per-piece estimate of how many people could see a specific item of coverage.
It uses site traffic as an input, while also accounting for the article’s placement, the size and influence of the site, and social sharing activity around the piece.
That gives the reader a more useful way to compare selected pieces of coverage on a consistent basis.
It also avoids presenting every article on a large publication as though it reached the full monthly audience of the entire site.
The coverage list itself becomes more useful too.
For a lot of PR teams, the final selection of coverage ends up in a spreadsheet. Someone pastes in URLs. Someone else hunts down outlet information and metrics. Then someone has to take the screenshots and turn that tracker into a presentation polished enough to send to the client.
In CoverageBook, all your coverage is stored in your Coverage Vault.
Paste in selected online and social URLs and it collects screenshots, publication information, and available metrics. Then add print, broadcast, or other offline coverage too. It’s there for whenever you want it. Here’s some ways that people use it:
- Refine coverage by date, report, campaign, or your highlights
- Create a new report of all the coverage, sort by views, engagements and more
- Filter coverage by type, brand prominence, sentiment and activity
- Merge or combine reports to make summaries such as annual reports
- Find your best clips by brand or campaign quickly
- Share a single piece of coverage – with all the metrics added
It’s incredibly useful and much more maintainable.
How the two tools connect in practice
In practice, most people use Meltwater and CoverageBook like this:
- Use Meltwater for monitoring, alerts, competitive context, and the broad picture of what is being said
- Select the links and coverage that you want to show off in a report at some points. This could be a client update, campaign review, leadership report, or new-business presentation.
- Add the selected coverage to CoverageBook. CoverageBook accepts online links and coverage files, then generates screenshots and relevant data. You can use the CoverageBook Chrome extension to do this too if you find that easier.
- Review the Coverage Analysis for each piece. Add or correct Brand Prominence, Sentiment, Coverage Type, and PR Activity where needed.
Which pieces genuinely belong in the story you are trying to tell?
A client may forward a link. A journalist may send a piece directly. An important social post may emerge from a manual search. A print or broadcast item may need adding alongside online coverage.
CoverageBook gives all of that selected material a shared home, whatever its source.
It also means the team can use the same verified coverage again. It can be searched, filtered, reused in future reports, or pulled into a new-business presentation or award entry.
The PR team may need the breadth and detail of Meltwater.
Most clients and senior stakeholders do not need to navigate an entire monitoring environment.
They want to see the coverage, understand why it mattered, and know what the PR activity achieved.
A CoverageBook report is a different presentation of the work for a different audience. It puts the actual articles, screenshots, metrics, and campaign narrative at the centre rather than asking a stakeholder to interpret a monitoring interface.
From there, it’s a case of using CoverageBook’s reports to add slides and build reports around the coverage you want to present to your stakeholders.
Here’s an example of what you can do with the presentation features.
It’s not a choice between Meltwater or CoverageBook, it’s both!
Keep Meltwater for the broad media-intelligence job it is built to do.
Add CoverageBook when the work shifts from monitoring the whole landscape to showing, analysing, and explaining the coverage that matters most.
Meltwater tells you what is happening around the brand.
CoverageBook helps you show what the PR work produced, what that coverage means, and why a stakeholder should care.
They are not replacements. For the right team, they are two useful layers of the same PR workflow.
Start a free 30-day CoverageBook trial and see how quickly you can turn selected Meltwater results into a coverage report that is built to be read.