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Tools_for_Online_Tracking
| Tools for Online Tracking
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
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