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Tools for Online Tracking
By Sharon 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 in 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, they 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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Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll
(http://www.feedforall.com) software for creating, editing
and publishing RSS feeds and NotePage http://www.notepage.net
a wireless text messaging software.
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