This is the third installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.
Managing multiple Google Alerts effectively is the key to extracting the best sales leads from the results Google sends you. AlertRank is designed to take over this management process from your email program. This post will cover the major features of the alerts listing page, where you will spend most of your time when using the site.
Search within your alerts
You can create highly specific search terms when you create your alerts, but then you could miss a lot of results. I find it better to create general searches, and then use the search within AlertRank to pull out the results I need. For example, instead of creating alerts for different cities, I created general alerts on new and remodeled restaurants. Now that I have the alerts, I can search for any city I want to work with. This is not going back to Google for the search. It’s just selecting the matching items within the alerts I have received.
Select by date
By default, AlertRank shows you all the alerts for the last 30 days, sorted with the most recent first. You can click on the date control to isolate a specific range of alerts by date.
Select by alert properties
When you click on the settings control, you get a wide range of selection options. You can choose just those alerts that came from Google News, allow commenting, and have a minimum Alertrank quality score, among other options.
These choices can be combined with a date range and search to let you pull out exactly the sales leads you need.
Custom column display
The alerts listing displays the most commonly used properties of each alert, but you can click the Customize Columns link to display a list of additional columns you want to see.
This choice of columns will become your new default, and will be shown whenever you use the site.
You can hide any of these columns with the same pulldown menu, and also set the display back to the original column settings.
Sort by alert properties
The listing is normally sorted by date received, but if you click any column heading, the list will be sorted by that column. Clicking the heading again reverses the order. I like to sort the alerts by the AlertRank quality score, so I can see the most important alerts at the top.
Setting the sentiment for each alert
The first column in the alerts listing is used to display the sentiment rating for each alert. This allows you to rate the alerts as positive or negative. This is done by clicking within this column. Some monitoring products try to judge the sentiment for you through textual analysis, but that generally depends on simplistic searches for words like “love” and “hate.” We explored this idea when building AlertRank, but soon realized that this doesn’t give the user enough control. When it comes to sales leads, you know best how to decide whether an alert is good or bad for your business. So you make the choice, and then as we’ll see later, AlertRank uses the setting in many ways.
Recording the alerts you’ve read
AlertRank knows which alerts you’ve read, just like an email program or feed reader.
It keeps track of when you click an alert to view its page, and then removes the bold face from the alert’s title to tell you that you’ve read this.
You can use the settings panel at any time to select just those alerts that you haven’t read. You can also reset the read status, if you want to keep this alert with the ones you haven’t read yet.
Deleting alerts
You can delete alerts individually, or select multiple alerts and delete them all at once.
The alerts trash listing will retain all the deleted alerts, so you can review them, and restore any that you change your mind about.
Learn how to share all the alerts you find with AlertRank in the next post in this series.
Related Posts
{ 0 comments… add one now }