Building BrandMentions — The Brand Intelligence Engine
Services
Client
Year
Website
The Context & Challenge
In 2017, the team behind CognitiveSEO set out to solve a growing tension in digital marketing: brands could measure traffic and backlinks — but not conversation.
Mentions were scattered across news sites, blogs, and social platforms.
Tools existed, but they were fragmented, slow, and social-only.
What marketers really needed was clarity: a single platform that could listen to the entire web in real time, transform noise into insight, and visualize how a brand was truly perceived.
That vision became BrandMentions — a product built to listen, connect, and make sense of global brand chatter.
Design a platform powerful enough for analysts yet intuitive enough for marketers.
The system had to process thousands of mentions, detect sentiment, compare competitors, and produce actionable insights — all in one clear, human interface.
It wasn’t just about showing data. It was about showing meaning.
Design Objectives
We focused on turning raw, real-time data into an experience of understanding:
A unified interface for visualizing and filtering mentions across the entire web.
An efficient navigation system for switching between brands, competitors, and topics.
A clear data hierarchy that makes large datasets readable and comparable.
Reports and segmentation tools that feel analytical yet approachable.
Automated alerts and white-label exports designed for agencies, without extra complexity.
The Design Process
We began by mapping user journeys across three key roles — marketers, SEO specialists, and brand managers. Each approached reputation tracking differently: some wanted spikes, others trends, others influence. Our job was to make all three feel equally at home.
The information architecture emerged around four pillars:
My Mentions – the real-time activity feed
Competitor Mentions – comparative tracking
Topic Monitoring – thematic listening
Reports & Insights – automated analytics dashboards
A secondary layer housed project settings, keyword rules, social connections, and tracking pixels.
The result was a structure that felt both scalable and immediate — clear enough for beginners, deep enough for experts.
Visual Direction
Data should never feel overwhelming.
We designed a visual system that radiated confidence — neutral enough to let information shine, yet alive with subtle gradients and typographic rhythm.
A modular grid anchored the layout across:
Dashboard views: mentions graphs, source breakdowns, engagement trends
Detail views: expanded mentions, author info, contextual sentiment
Report builders: customizable chart and table components
Every color cue carried semantic weight: orange for alerts, green for outreach, blue for neutral mentions. Charts and lists followed strict visual rhythm, with micro-interactions (hover, filter, pin) that made exploration feel effortless.
The Outcome
The design system and information architecture we created remained the product’s foundation long after launch, as the team expanded into new analytics and integration layers.
When BrandMentions launched, it quickly became a go-to platform for digital marketers, agencies, and PR teams seeking real-time brand intelligence.
It was among the first tools to unify:
Web + social coverage in a single view
Real-time data collection
Custom reporting and sentiment segmentation
Influencer discovery and alert automation
We wanted people to feel like they were listening to the internet breathe, and understand what it meant.
We wanted people to feel like they were listening to the internet breathe, and understand what it meant.
Reflection
BrandMentions was more than a dashboard project — it was a conversation engine. It turned scattered, unstructured mentions into patterns of meaning. And for us, it marked a defining step in shaping how Product Rocket designs clarity inside complexity.
This project became a blueprint for our later SaaS work — where data doesn’t just inform, it tells a story.
