The filters you set up under tender search determine which tender competitions Cobrief shows across the entire workspace. This also affects which tender alerts you receive, and the relevance score assigned to each tender.
Note: To keep the company's search profile tidy and consistent, only users with the Administrator role can set up and make changes to the tender search. If the agent suggests changes to the search profile, an Administrator must approve the whole change in the chat before it is saved.
Set up filters by selecting "Filtering" in settings.
From here you can customize the following filters:
CPV codes - When buyers announce new tenders, they choose from a set of 9,454 standardized CPV codes. Here you can choose which codes Cobrief should show you tenders for.
Keywords - When a notice contains one of the keywords you've selected in its description or title, Cobrief will show you the tender.
Buyers - Select specific buyers you want to receive or not receive alerts for.
Tender phases - Choose whether you also want to be notified about planning phases, so you can prepare for important future tender competitions.
Country: Choose one or more of the 30+ European countries Cobrief covers. With no country selected, you get competitions from every country we cover. See coverage per country, or how to add new countries.
Place of performance - Choose one or more regions where you can deliver tenders to narrow down your search. Notices not tied to a location can be performed from anywhere in the country.
Relevance score - CPV codes, keywords and buyers you have prioritized affect the relevance score a tender receives, both how specific they are and the number of matches. Tender phases, country and place of performance do not affect the score. With this filter you can choose to only be alerted about tenders above a certain score.
The two most important filters are CPV codes (1) and keywords (2).
How the filters work together
It helps to understand how the filters combine, since it determines which tenders you actually get.
CPV codes and keywords widen the search. A tender shows up if it matches either one of your codes or one of your keywords. You don't need a match on both a code and a keyword, one of them is enough. Buyers you have prioritized are always included on top.
Country, place of performance and relevance score narrow it down. A tender must also fit these filters to be shown. If you set the place of performance to a single region, for example, tenders to be delivered elsewhere are removed.
Buyers you have excluded are always removed, regardless of whether the tender matches your codes or keywords.
Because codes and keywords widen the search, adding more of them gives you more matches, not fewer. If you want fewer and more precise alerts, place of performance and relevance score are usually the right dials to turn.
CPV Codes
In CPV codes you can search for specific codes, and the matches will be highlighted. CPV codes are built up in a tree structure, where the number of digits in the code indicates how specific the code is. In general, the most general codes (high up in the tree) give the most hits and therefore also the most noise, because buyers use them across many different tenders.
Note that Cobrief matches tenders tagged with exactly the codes you have ticked. Selecting a higher-level code does not automatically include the more specific codes beneath it, so tick the sub-codes you want to be picked up by.
When you select CPV codes, Cobrief will suggest other codes that buyers often use alongside the code you selected. This is a good way to find new relevant codes for your company.
At the bottom next to the save button, you can see the number of hits your search will produce, which is often a good indication of whether your search is too narrow or too broad. We recommend having between 5 and 20 hits per week, depending on how broad an area you deliver to.
Tip: Watch the change in weekly hits when you select a code to avoid overly broad CPV codes.
Keywords
Notices don't always have the most accurate CPV codes, so it's useful to use keywords to make sure you're still notified about the tenders. In addition, keywords have a positive effect on the relevance score, which is very useful if you also use a filter on relevance score.
You'll find the keywords by clicking "Keywords" in the menu on the left.
From here Cobrief suggests relevant keywords based on the CPV codes you've selected, but you can also enter your own keywords by typing in the text field and pressing "Add".
We recommend choosing industry-specific keywords so you avoid alerts across all industries.
Examples of good keywords in this example are "marketing", "graphic design", "visual identity" and "typography", while bad examples could be "management", "consultation" and "advisory".
Each keyword is evaluated on its own, and a tender matches if the text contains at least one of your keywords. More keywords therefore make the alert broader, not narrower. If you enter a keyword with several words (for example "graphic design"), it matches when those words appear next to each other. You can't require two words to appear together by entering them separately, and you can't exclude words.
Note! Remember that changes to filtering affect everyone in your workspace, and only Administrators can make changes.