Make the alerts earn their keep
How to Set Up Contracts Finder Alerts Properly
Most suppliers who set up a Contracts Finder alert do it once, badly, and quietly conclude that "there is nothing out there". Usually there is plenty; the alert was just built to miss it. A poorly configured alert either stays silent for weeks or buries one relevant notice under fifty irrelevant ones, and both outcomes train you to stop looking.
Contracts Finder still matters in the post-Procurement Act world: it carries England's below-threshold publication notices (contracts over £30,000 for most buyers, over £12,000 for central government) and procurements begun under the old rules, which run to completion under the previous regime. Getting its alerts right is worth the half hour it takes. This guide shows how, and is honest about where Contracts Finder alerts simply cannot reach.
Set the alert up around codes, not just words
The default instinct is to type your trade into the keyword box and stop there. That single keyword is the most common reason alerts fail: it misses every notice whose title uses a different word, and it catches every unrelated notice that happens to share yours. The fix is to anchor the alert on CPV codes - the classification the buyer files under - and use keywords as a supplement, not the foundation.
Build a shortlist of the CPV codes that describe your core work plus their immediate parents, and add those to the alert. Then layer keywords on top to catch the edges - a couple of broad terms and a couple of specific ones. Our CPV codes guide covers how to assemble that shortlist without going too narrow or too broad.
- Lead with CPV codes - they catch badly titled notices a keyword search misses
- Add a small set of keywords as a supplement, mixing broad and specific terms
- Set a sensible location filter, but do not over-tighten it if you can travel for the right job
- Include "planning" and pipeline notice types, not just live tenders - early notices let you shape a requirement before it is fixed
- Use a monitored inbox, ideally one more than one person can reach
Tune it over the first fortnight
An alert is not a set-and-forget tool; it is a dial you adjust. For the first two weeks, read what arrives and ask one question of each notice: should this have reached me, or not? Too much noise means a keyword is too broad or a code too high up the tree. Silence usually means the codes are too narrow or the location filter too tight.
A useful habit is to note the CPV codes on any genuinely relevant notice your alert caught - and on any you found by accident that it missed. Those real-world codes are the best possible guide to refining the alert, because they come from your actual market rather than guesswork.
Resist the urge to widen the alert the moment it goes quiet for a few days. Public buying is lumpy: a fortnight of silence in your category is normal, and reacting to it by bolting on broad keywords usually trades real silence for fake noise. Judge the alert over a month, against whether the notices it does send are ones you would seriously consider, not against how many it sends.
What Contracts Finder alerts will never catch
This is the part the official guidance skips. Even a perfectly tuned Contracts Finder alert has structural blind spots, because Contracts Finder is only one portal among several. It will not show you new regulated procurements that now publish on Find a Tender, anything in Scotland (Public Contracts Scotland), or the below-threshold council work that lives on regional portals like ProContract as invitation-only Quick Quotes.
So a Contracts Finder alert is worth setting up well, but treat it as one input, not your whole market view. The practical answer is to run alerts across Find a Tender and Contracts Finder, register on the devolved and regional portals your buyers use, and accept that watching all of them by hand is more tabs than a working business can keep open. Our guide on Contracts Finder versus Find a Tender maps exactly what each portal does and does not carry.
The deeper problem is not any single portal but the fragmentation across all of them. Each one has its own alert system, its own quirks, and its own gaps, and keeping six well-tuned alerts running in parallel is a job in itself - the kind of overhead that quietly defeats a small business and pushes it back to checking one site occasionally. A well-built Contracts Finder alert is a genuine improvement on no alert at all; it is just not, on its own, the same thing as seeing your market.
Frequently asked questions
Why are my Contracts Finder alerts so noisy?
Almost always a keyword that is too broad or a CPV code set too high in the hierarchy. Tighten the codes to your actual offerings, swap a broad keyword for a couple of specific ones, and read the first fortnight's results to see which rule is misfiring.
Should I use keywords or CPV codes for alerts?
Both, but lead with codes. CPV codes catch notices whose titles a keyword search would miss, and keywords then catch the edges the codes do not. A codes-first alert with a few supplementary keywords is far more reliable than keywords alone.
Will a Contracts Finder alert show me every relevant tender?
No. Contracts Finder carries England's below-threshold notices and legacy-rules procurements, but new regulated procurements publish on Find a Tender, Scotland publishes separately, and small council work lives on regional portals. One alert on one portal leaves real gaps.
Tune one feed instead of five separate alerts
BidSquirrel runs your codes and keywords across Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, the devolved portals and the council ProContract systems at once, then scores each match against your business so the noise never reaches you. We do the watching; you do the bidding.