>> 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 << |
