Getting started

This page takes you from an empty screen to your first finished report.

Your first report

You don’t have to build your first report by hand. When you sign up, Palmata starts one for you automatically — the report list greets you with a welcome screen while it’s prepared, and your first audit appears there within a few minutes. Open it from the report list, or choose New Report to set up another audit.

A short guided tour points out the main parts of the app the first time through. Step through it with the arrow keys or the on-screen controls, or skip it — you can always come back to any view on your own.

On mobile, open Assistance near the bottom of the sidebar to take or resume the tour, open Documentation or Support, or send Feedback.

Run a report

When you reopen Palmata, recent reports can appear immediately while the latest data loads. A small loading ring around the sidebar open/close button appears during the background update, and you can keep using the app.

Click New Report to open the report builder. Start with the settings that define what Palmata will audit.

Report type — choose the depth of report you need. The builder shows the credit cost for the selected type before you submit it.

Brand name — the name buyers use for you. What you’d expect to hear in an answer.

If the name includes a report number or extra context, Palmata identifies the actual brand and counts that name as an alias when reviewing answers. A product or sub-brand report keeps that entity as its target.

Domain(s) — your website. Add more than one owned domain with a comma or the Enter key. Include every domain you own that publishes content buyers might read, so pages on any of them count as yours.

Answer Engines — choose which available answer engines run the report. The options depend on your organization’s plan and configuration.

Steering instructions (optional) — up to 100,000 characters describing the products, audiences, markets, or questions you want to investigate. For example, “focus on how legal teams compare contract-management software.” Without steering, Palmata researches your business to choose the report’s focus.

Refine the plan

Keep steering focused on what should change: your goal, business context, audiences, markets, terminology, comparisons, exclusions, or the kinds of questions people would ask. A sentence can be enough for a simple goal. Use more detail when it matters; retain conditions, uncertainty and examples that help define a specialized question style.

You can guide segmentation and supported workflow choices, such as asking to omit the buyer journey for a news-discovery study. You do not need to restate Palmata’s standard research, scoring or recommendation steps. Describe a claim you want to test without requiring the answers to confirm it.

Choose Update after changing the steering instructions. Palmata summarizes how it interpreted them and prepares the plan settings you can adjust before building the report. Changes you make directly to filters, aliases, entity hints, additional domains, or journey and automatic-filter controls carry over. Settings inferred from your instructions are interpreted again when you update or build the report.

State the geographic coverage you want in your steering instructions. An exclusive market focus keeps topics and questions relevant to offerings and decisions in that market. If you want to study travel, relocation, or buying across borders, include that in the subject. Search location represents the audience asking the question; it can differ from a travel destination or a product’s country of origin.

Report prose uses English unless the current steering explicitly requests another language for the whole report. A market or search-question language does not set the report language.

Describe what you want to learn, either as an instruction or a question. “How are our running shoes doing?” focuses the report on running shoes. “How do we look to first-time runners?” explores that audience’s needs, buying criteria and naturally phrased questions. If you supply a reference article or assessment, explain how it should guide the analysis. Palmata researches its stated criteria and distinguishes them from inferred questions.

You can also request a particular question voice, such as “write the prompts in a Gen Z customer voice.” Palmata interprets the audience and wording conventions; you do not need to list each detail separately. Examples are optional. The perspective applies to search questions, while the report keeps its usual style.

Use Add market filter or Add custom filter to organize the finished report around the segments you care about. Choose Save filter after entering a custom filter. If a filter editor is still open when you try to build the report, Palmata prompts you to save or cancel it first. You can also let Palmata generate additional filters and organize prompts by the Discovery, Evaluation, and Decision stages of the buyer journey.

Enter a country, city, or region for a market’s geography. Palmata resolves that location when you choose Preview Prompts or Build report, preserving a narrower city or region. Editing or saving a draft keeps your entered wording; if a location is ambiguous, clarify it before continuing.

Preview Prompts generates sample topics and questions so you can check the report’s focus before committing. Generating a preview uses the credit price shown in the builder and is subject to temporary usage limits.

Prompt previews run as background jobs; a temporary connection loss does not stop generation, and completed previews are saved with their plans. The countdown starts when steering compilation begins, or when research begins if no steering compilation is needed. Time waiting for generation to start is excluded. The countdown estimates 100 seconds. If it runs out, Finishing up appears while generation continues. If generation cannot finish within three minutes, it stops. Try again with the same settings.

Open Templates & Drafts to load settings from an earlier report plan or a saved draft. Matching audience and search locations appear as one market. Remove that market to clear its matching locations from the plan. Choose Save to drafts if you want to return to the current setup later.

Build or request the report

Choose Build report when the setup is ready. The button shows the report’s credit cost, and submitting it spends those credits — see Billing & Credits for how that’s counted. If your role can’t build reports directly, choose Request report to send the setup to an admin for approval instead.

If the brand name contains numbers or symbols, a yellow warning icon appears in the field. When you submit, Review brand name lets you edit the Brand name and Report title. Use the brand, product or service you want to analyze as the brand name; keep additional metadata in the report title. Choose Continue and build report (or Continue and request report) to keep a name that includes numbers or symbols. You can also choose Back to setup.

The confirmation lets you review or edit the report name before returning to the report list; this changes how you identify the report, not its content. If recurring reports are available to your organization, you can also review or edit the rerun schedule there. Palmata notifies you when the report is ready, usually within an hour. Reports requested by members wait for admin approval first.

Reuse a finished report’s plan

Open a finished report and choose Report Plan in the header to review its complete plan. Reports with custom steering retain the steering icon, while reports without it show an information icon. You can edit the report name from the plan without changing its content. The plan includes the brand, report type, domains, answer engines, topic settings, journey structure, filters, markets, and automatic rerun schedule used for that report. When a report has more than three domains, hover over the additional-domains pill to see the complete list.

Choose Create a report from this plan to open the New Report builder with that plan selected. You can review or change the settings before building the new report.

While it builds

Reports continue building when you leave the page. Palmata notifies you when yours is ready.

If you do watch, the Analyzing [Brand] screen shows three things: an estimated time remaining, a live feed of what the research is doing right now, and a checklist of the stages it moves through. Use the feed to check the current work; you can return later to review the finished report.

Palmata checks generated questions against your requested scope, language, and voice. Questions that fail correction are replaced with fresh questions and checked again. Any that still fail review are excluded, and the report continues with the approved questions. The activity feed shows the reduced question count when this happens.

If topic and prompt review is enabled for your organization, the report pauses after it generates each set. Eligible report editors can adjust selections, add or edit items, delete items, or restore them before the report continues. Each explicit change saves immediately and is shared with other eligible editors; text you are still typing is not shared until you select Save.

Topics and prompt groups are marked Reviewed as you move through them. Use the status menu to mark a prompt group Needs review when another editor should inspect it. Your shared review progress remains available if you refresh or return later. Choose Continue report when you are ready. If some topics or prompt groups have not been reviewed, use Keep reviewing to return to the first one or Continue anyway to proceed with the current selections.

Report states

Back on the report list, each report carries a badge:

• Running — building now. Open it to watch the progress screen. Reports remain in this state while Palmata finishes the work, even when progress updates pause temporarily.
• Paused — waiting for an eligible editor to review generated topics or prompts. Open it to continue the shared review.
• Failed — something stopped it. Open it for two choices: Resume picks up where it left off; Restart runs it again from the top.
• Cancelled — you stopped it. The same Resume and Restart options are there.
• Private / Shared — a finished report, and whether anyone else in your org can see it.

Palmata automatically resumes interrupted work when recovery can help. If the same failure returns, it checks whether another resume can succeed. When a fix is needed or the cause is uncertain, the report shows Failed so you can review it instead of waiting through repeated attempts.

When a report finishes, open it and start with Brand Perception. Concepts explains the measurements and signal states.