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. Use that one to find your feet, then build your own with New Report below.

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.

Run a report

The report list, where finished and in-progress reports appear with status badges

Click New Report. You’ll fill in three things.

The New Report form with fields for brand name and domain

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

Domain — your website. To include more than one owned domain, comma-separate them: acme.com, acme-product.io. Add every domain you own that publishes content buyers might read, so pages on any of them count as yours.

Steering instructions (optional) — a sentence or two telling the audit where to aim. “Focus on enterprise SaaS positioning.” “We sell to legal teams, not IT.” Leave it blank and the audit reads your market on its own. Add it when you already know the corner you care about.

The plan step

If you add steering, Palmata builds a plan before it runs anything, and shows it to you first. You see the topics it intends to cover and how it read your instructions, and you can adjust before committing. Confirm the plan and the report starts.

Without steering, there’s no plan to review — the report starts as soon as you confirm.

Either way, building a report spends credits from your plan — see Billing & Credits for how that’s counted. If your role can’t build reports directly, the button sends the request to an admin for approval instead.

If you’ve run audits before, Use a previous plan loads the topics and steering from an earlier one, so a recurring audit stays consistent run to run.

While it builds

A report takes a while to build — this is deep research, not a quick lookup. You don’t have to sit and watch. Leave the page and come back; it keeps running.

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. The feed is there so you can see the work happening, not so you have to follow every line.

The Analyzing screen showing time remaining, a live activity feed, and a stage checklist

Report states

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

Running — building now. Open it to watch the progress screen.
Unresponsive — running, but no recent activity. Usually it recovers on its own.
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.

When a report finishes, open it and start with Brand Perception. If this is your first one, read Concepts first — it’s the difference between looking at the charts and knowing what they’re telling you.