Custom reports in Brand24: what they prove, and what they can't

The five-minute version of building one

If you just landed here to make the report and leave, this is the whole flow. It really is a few clicks.

One detail worth knowing before you send it to a client: per Brand24's PDF report docs, a PDF includes up to 100 mentions with links (social media links excluded), and the Excel export carries links to news and blog posts but not to social platforms. If your stakeholder wants to click through to every mention, that cap matters.

What you can put in the report

The customization is genuinely good. You are choosing which slices of monitoring data to surface for a given audience.

Read that list again and notice what every item has in common: each one describes conversation that already happened. The report is a camera pointed at the past month. A very good camera. Brand24's own comprehensive report page frames it as keeping stakeholders informed with results from a given period. Informed. Not increased.

A monitoring report and an outcome ledger are different documents

This is the part that the existing playbooks on this topic leave on the table. There are two completely different documents people both call "a report," and confusing them is how a marketing team ends up presenting a beautiful PDF that proves nothing about its own work.

Brand24 produces the document on the left, and it is the right tool for that job. The mistake is expecting the document on the left to answer a question only the document on the right can: did the effort we paid for this month actually create reach, and how much?

What an outcome ledger looks like in the open

S4L is the done-for-you Reddit and Twitter brand-awareness side of this. Because the service is the thing causing the reach, its reporting is built the other way around from a monitoring tool: not "what is being said" but "what did the work we shipped this week actually move." You do not have to take that on faith. The page-scoring logic is in the public repo.

score = pageviews        * 1
      + email_signups    * 100
      + schedule_clicks  * 500
      + get_started_clicks * 300
      + bookings         * 1000

The pricing follows from the same shape. S4L is performance-priced at $1 per 1,000 impressions delivered and $50 per 1,000 site visits attributed, invoiced monthly, no retainer and no setup fee. The report and the invoice are the same line items because both are built from reach that was caused, not reach that was observed.

So which one do you actually need?

Both, for different questions, and they sit happily next to each other.

• Use a Brand24 custom report when you need to track share of voice, catch sentiment shifts, hand a branded monitoring PDF to a stakeholder, or watch a launch unfold in real time. It is the mirror.
• Use a done-for-you service like S4L when the share of voice you are monitoring is too low and you need someone to go raise it in the communities where your buyers actually are, with reporting that proves the lift was caused, not coincidental.

The honest case where the monitoring tool wins outright: if your only job is to watch, you do not need a distribution service, and paying per impression for reach you were going to track anyway makes no sense. Buy the camera, skip the engine.