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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 per cent of Internet users find websites with
the help of 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
Receive 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 in real time.
Searches can be categorized to search, blog entries, SEC/EDGAR Filings, press
releases, news group postings, 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 is a directory of online monitoring tools and applications
http://www.monitoring-tools.net
Monitoring Software is a collection of downloadable monitoring software solutions.
http://www.monitoring-software.net
About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net
and FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com |
