Five minutes of prep here saves you re-doing the setup later

  • Confirm your plan is active: Monitoring is included in CIMS Core, Pro and Agency Mode. If the feature looks locked or you see limited options, log out and back in first — that resolves most access glitches.
  • Check your credit balance: Adding profiles to monitoring draws on your account's shared credit pool; the balance is shown in the header of any campaign's Monitoring tab. Credits reset each billing cycle and do not roll over.
  • Have your creator list ready: Your guest list, sendout list or campaign roster — with handles, ideally as full profile URLs.
  • Decide your tracking window: Start at least one day before the event and run it well past it.
  • Write down your keywords: Brand handle, campaign hashtag, event hashtag, product name, and common misspellings.
  • Public profiles only: CIMS collects from public accounts. If a creator's profile is private, their content cannot be tracked automatically — you will need to collect that one manually.

Step 1 — Create the campaign and add creators

Monitoring lives inside a campaign, not on its own. Create the campaign first, then gather the profiles you expect to post about you — which keeps tracking focused on the people who matter for this activation, rather than the whole internet.
  1. Where to find it: There is no Monitoring entry in the main sidebar. Every campaign has its own left-hand menu, and Monitoring is a tab in it — that is where you configure and watch it.
  2. Go to Campaigns and choose New campaign. Pick Monitoring if you are only tracking organic posts.
  3. Name it something you will recognise in three months — for example "Uniqlo Stockholm Event — Sept 2026" — then set market, industry and manager and choose Add campaign.
  4. Open the campaign's Creators tab and add your creators. Search by handle, or paste the full profile URL. Add each platform separately: a creator who posts on both Instagram and TikTok needs both profiles added if you want both tracked.
  5. Review the list before moving on. Every profile here consumes credits and contributes to your reporting — remove anyone who is not genuinely part of this activation.
Why it works: No creator onboarding required. Creators do not need a CIMS account, an invitation, or to approve anything. CIMS reads their public profiles. This is what makes monitoring viable for PR and event work, where you often have fifty guests and no contracts.
If a profile will not load or spins for a long time: go to Creator Scouting and paste the creator's full profile URL (for example https://www.instagram.com/username/) rather than searching the handle. This resolves the large majority of "profile won't load" cases. If it is a brand-new profile to your account, first-time indexing can take a few minutes.