4 Prompt Tracking Mistakes — Whiteboard Friday

1. Consider specifying locations or personas

So one of the big ones that you could play with is locations and personas. 

So, in your traditional rank tracking, something that a lot of people do and something that I’ve done in the past is take the same keyword and then maybe track it from say 50 different postcodes, or something like that, to see if I get different responses. 

For different kinds of business, this may be more or less useful. Or if you’re not a business that deals in real-world locations, then maybe this would be more about personas. So instead of saying, “What is the best phone for me?” you might say, “What is the best phone for a university student who has to do document editing on the go?” or something like this. That’s a pretty strange example, but for example. Then you might have various other personas, or you might have various other locations, depending on the type of business. 

2. Play around with different languages

The second thing you can do is play around with languages. 

So at the moment, most prompt-tracking tools are somewhat language-ambivalent because most of the interfaces that they deal with are also language-ambivalent. 

ChatGPT basically responds in whatever language you use. You can open ChatGPT. The interface is in English. If you type to it in Italian, it will reply to you in Italian. So you can take advantage of that. If you do exist in multiple markets where you want to see what the responses are like in different languages, you can take advantage of that and just track prompts in whatever languages you see fit. 

Obviously, that could be combined with the location point. 

Then these last two ideas are slightly different. So this is less about sort of prompt expansion in terms of getting the prompt you want to track to get more detail and to be more representative, and more about getting sort of different types of insights rather than just performance.

3. Specify qualities

So, for example, instead of saying what is the best iPhone for blah, blah, blah, you could say what is the cheapest phone, or the most durable phone, or the most trustworthy phone, or the most privacy-respecting phone. You could have these as sort of different campaigns that you track in order to get different types of insights. 

4. Identify and focus on market gaps

Or the flip side of that, this would take a little bit more processing on your part to go through these insights, but you could ask, “What is it that the Samsung phone does better than the iPhone,” or something like this, and then get sort of more qualitative insights out that you could then track over time to see whether you’re making a difference in your marketing with that perception. 

All right. I hope you like these ideas. I hope you’re not making these mistakes. If you are, I hope this was useful. Thank you very much. See you in the next Whiteboard Friday.