A Different Way to Use Google Alerts

By Adam Garcia, Associate Director, Paid Advertising

Google’s News Alerts have been around for some time so I’m sure most people are familiar with them. For those of you that read our blog, you’ll remember two earlier postings about how to use Alerts, both written by Dave McAnally about reputation management.

What I’m going to write about is another use for Alerts, one that I find useful for my search campaigns. I setup alerts with the following settings:

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Create a Google Alert

Once you have it set the way you want it, you’ll begin to receive alerts as soon as the setting allows.

Now, to actually get an actionable item from these alerts you need to read the articles that it sends to you. This will do two things:

  • Keep you up to speed on events and news related to your brand which will…
  • Help you develop negative keywords to add to your campaign.

By watching what the news outlets are writing about, you can stay ahead of traffic that might come your way. Alerts are a great way to find negatives to keep this traffic from altering your metrics. For example, if you are working on a banking client and your goal is registrations, you may have a CPA goal. If there are rumors of a bankruptcy, then you can safely assume that there will be an increase in searches for “bank name bankruptcy” resulting in inefficient traffic. By adding the word “bankruptcy” as a negative you can mitigate some of the negative effects of this unwanted traffic. Adding keywords such as “layoff” or other negative news items will help keep the research traffic away. Use this to supplement your search query report research.

This is one of many uses for Google Alerts, but it’s a simple addition to your routine and can produce great results. Add it to your routine as soon as you can.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You are absolutely right in recommending Google Alerts for online marketing. They provide lots of actionable intelligence, such as news items you can pass along to clients for a drip marketing campaign, or a source of links that can be turned into a blog post. They save tons of time over repeating Google searches by hand. Here is an example from my blog of using a large set of alerts for legal marketing:

http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/05/21/legal-marketing-with-google-alerts-google-antitrust-investigation/

CJeffCampbell said...

For webmasters, blog masters, link builders, and website owners, you can also use Google alerts to see who and when someone links to you. Do a Comprehensive Alert for news on "link:www.yourwebsite.com" and you'll get those helpful updates.

 
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