By S. Housley
In order to determine which advertising and marketing efforts are effective you
must have ways to measure the results of those efforts. Alerts and instant notifications
can be instrumental in monitoring search engine position, trademarked terms, monitoring
competitors and staying abreast of online occurrences. And, of course, the notification
can be used for "ego searches".
Ego Searches
What is an ego search? Find out where your name or company is mentioned, view forum
posts or online articles that mention your name or company.
Trademarks
The best offense is a good defense. By monitoring newsgroups or search engines for
trademarked terms, you often head off a future conflict. As a trademark owner, it
is your responsibility to actively protect your mark. Otherwise, you could lose
your trademark rights. Monitoring tools send immediate notification should any suspected
trademark infringements occur.
Search Position
Statistics show that more than 85% of Internet users find web sites with the help
of the search engines. Therefore, a website's search engine position is crucial
to its success. Prudent webmasters regularly check their search engine position.
Monitoring fluctuations and re-indexing of major search engines affects keyword
terms and phrases. Monitoring of positions will alert webmasters to any shifts before
sales decline.
Competitor Watch
Monitoring newsgroups for mentions of competitors may allow you opportunities to
chime in and offer an alternative solution in a helpful, friendly way. Knowing exactly
what your online competitors are doing provides a competitive edge that can be used
to your advantage.
Website Downtime
Accessibility is the most critical measure of your website's performance. If customers
can't access your site, they can't shop; and if they can't shop, they can't buy.
More important, your business could gain a bad reputation among your customers,
which translates into negative word of mouth and even worse, if you're highly visible,
negative press. So regardless of what else you monitor, you want to monitor websites
for downtime.
Take a look at the various tools available and how they can be used to keep you
current on relevant issues.
WebAlerts - Recieve email updates of the latest relevant Google results
based on your choice of query or topic. Alerts can be sent based on information
in Google News, Google Searches or both.
http://www.google.com/webalerts
PubSub - PubSub matches your requests against new information as it
appears real time. Searches can be categorized to search, blog entries, SEC/EDGAR
Filings, press releases, news group posts or flight delays.
http://www.pubsub.com
Ego Alerts - Google news search turned into an RSS feed.
http://www.justinpfister.com/gnewsfeed.php
Ebay Alerts - Ebay Alerts monitoring will create an RSS feed to monitor
Ebay auctions for specific keywords or phrases. When a new item that contains those
keywords is added to Ebay you will receive notification via your RSS feed!
http://www.freebiddingtools.com
Amazon Alerts - Generate a URL which you can use to automatically
search Amazon.com with your favorite RSS news reader. It will automatically update
you when new items meet your search criteria. I personally use it to look for new
books on topics I'm interested in, and I have the defaults set to do the same, but
you can adjust it to search any of Amazon's stores. You can also adjust the search
order and what kind of items you wish to search.
http://www.oxus.net/amazon
Internet Seer - InternetSeer remotely monitors your website to insure
that your site is available 24/7. If InternetSeer is unable to reach your site,
we will send you an immediate e-mail alert that your site is unreachable.
http://www.internetseer.com
NetNewsTracker - NetNews Tracker is a clipping service for Usenet
newsgroups. Newstracker searches newsgroups twice daily for any specified words
or phrases and delivers alerts via e-mail. Newstracker can be used to monitor newsgroups
for names, company names, products, URLs, or any other topic of interest.
http://www.netnewstracker.com
Other Suggested Resources -
Monitoring Tools - Monitoring Tools is a directory of online monitoring
tools and applications
http://www.monitoring-tools.net
Monitoring Software - Monitoring Software is a collection of downloadable
monitoring software solutions.
http://www.monitoring-software.net