|
Tools for Online Tracking
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
About
the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc.
http://www.notepage.net and FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com .
|
