This is the fourth 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.
The biggest weakness of Google Alerts as a lead generation tool is a total absence of reporting capabilities. The best you can do is forward individual emails, which is not a very effective way to share leads with your sales team. AlertRank adds a set of powerful Google alert reporting tools, including getting results as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF file.
Daily Excel summary
AlertRank automatically collects all the alerts you receive each 24 hours into an excel spreadsheet, and emails it to you every morning. Here is the spreadsheet I got this morning from the example grillalerts account.
The nice thing about getting this as an Excel file is that you can easily delete items, or add notes to others before emailing it to the sales staff. You can also control which alerts appear in the spreadsheet, or turn off delivery completely with the delivery settings page.
Daily PDF summary
AlertRank also delivers a PDF version of the alerts from the previous 24 hours each morning by email. This is a convenient format for sharing the alerts with clients or investors. Each alert in the PDF file has a link to the original page found by Google. Here is today’s PDF report for the grillalerts account.
The PDF summary has its own delivery settings page that has the same controls as the one for the Excel summary. You can control which types of alerts are delivered, and turn off the delivery with this page.
Custom PDF reporting
If you want even more control over your reports, you can open the Alerts Listing page, and select the print to PDF option. When you combine this with all the sorting, searching and selection options this page provides, you can create a highly customized report.
Here is a sample PDF report I created by customizing the columns displayed, sorting the results on Google PageRank, and selecting only those alerts for the search term “(renovate OR remodel) restaurant”.
Now that you know how to manage alerts more effectively, the next post in this series gives you my favorite tips for finding local sales leads with Google Alerts.
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