Tools for Online Tracking
Author: 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









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

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