To be successful online you need to have constant feedback of how you are performing, who is linking to you, how the search engines treat your site and whether your server hasn't had any hiccups recently.
More than these, in order to determine which advertising and marketing efforts are effective you must have some very good 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 this online tracking toolkit and learn how these tools can be used to keep you on top of the critical information items that give you the pulse of your online progress and health status:
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 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. and FeedForAll.