My case study has the best tips to get the most of out a free web monitoring tool like Google Alerts and Talkwalker

1. mat t hewwoodward.co.uk
http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/experiments/which-is-the-best-web-monitoring-tool-talkwalker-vs-google-alerts/
Matthew Woodward
Which Is The Best Web Monitoring Tool? TalkWalker vs Google
Alerts
Web monitoring tools are extremely powerf ul and have a number
of practical applications but they are of ten overlooked.
If you aren’t using one right now you are missing out big time – oh
they are f ree to use as well!
Basically they monitor the web f or certain key phrases and send
you an email or update an RSS f eed when it f inds a new result.
It might sound pretty basic but there are endless ways you can
use this tool across all of your online marketing campaigns.
In f act last year I won The Best Of SearchEngineJournal.com 2012
Award that you see in the header on the blog with a post on this
very subject.
You can use web monitoring tools f or a bunch of things such as-
Link building
Driving targeted traf f ic
Monitoring brand/competitors
Monitoring questions in your niche
Monitoring content distribution
Finding new guest post opportunities
Monitoring link building f ootprints
Monitoring site security
Monitoring shoppers
Regional based monitoring
Discovering new niches
Learn how to do all of that & more without spending a penny with this more detailed tutorial.
Google Alerts vs Talk Walker
For a long time Google Alerts was the king of web monitoring tools. As Google indexed new URL’s you would
get alerted if they matched your alerts settings.
However over the past 6 months or so people started to notice that things weren’t quite as good as they used
to be and were getting less and less alerts.

2. Towards the end of March we saw the launch of a rival service called TalkWalker Alerts which has a near
identical look and f eel to Google Alerts.
But which one is best?
The Experiment
To decide which one is best I decided to setup identical alerts across both services f or the f ollowing keywords-
Amy Bouzaglo (the crazy one)
BuzzBundle
Generate Traf f ic
Matthew Woodward
MatthewWoodward.co.uk
Tiered Link Building
I set these to email all results, once a day and collected the data f rom May 20th-June 10th.
Google Alerts Setup

3. TalkWalker Setup
I then went through every email and extracted every link segmenting them by keyword and service.
The full data set is available to download at the end of this post.
The Results

4. I decided to analyse the data in a number of ways to see which service perf ormed best.
Number Of Emails Sent
The experiment ran f or a total of 22 days and across that period the services sent this many emails-
60609090Amy BouzagloAmy BouzagloBuzzBundleBuzzBundleGenerate Traf f icGenerate Traf f icMatthew
WoodwardMatthew WoodwardMatthewWoodward.co.ukMatthewWoodward.co.ukTiered Link BuildingTiered Link
BuildingTotalsTotalsGoogle AlertsGoogle AlertsTalkWalkerTalkWalker
Google Alerts takes the victory on this sending 17 more alerts than TalkWalker Alerts.
Number Of Links Found
Where things change though is the number of links f ound overall. I extracted every single link f rom each email
which shows-
1.0001.0001.5001.500Amy BouzagloAmy BouzagloBuzzBundleBuzzBundleGenerate Traf f icGenerate
Traf f icMatthew WoodwardMatthew WoodwardMatthewWoodward.co.ukMatthewWoodward.co.ukTiered Link
BuildingTiered Link BuildingTotalsTotalsGoogle AlertsGoogle AlertsTalkWalkerTalkWalker
As you can see TalkWalker Alerts delivered signif icantly more results than Google Alerts.
But that is not necessarily a good thing – a lot of them might be irrelevant or junk.
Duplicate Results
Out of the 2,131 links f ound – Google Alerts f ound 331, whereas TalkWalker Alerts f ound 1,800.
What is interesting out of all of those results, only 40 of them were f ound by both services.
This means there was only a 1.87% overlap between the two services.
Keyword Mentioned On Page?
To test how relevant the results are I decided to see what % of pages actually included the exact target
keyword on page.
This was either in the title, meta description or within the page content itself .
50507575Amy BouzagloAmy BouzagloBuzzBundleBuzzBundleGenerate Traf f icGenerate Traf f icMatthew
WoodwardMatthew WoodwardMatthewWoodward.co.ukMatthewWoodward.co.ukTiered Link BuildingTiered Link
BuildingTotalsTotalsGoogle AlertsGoogle AlertsTalkWalkerTalkWalker
In total TalkWalker Alerts delivered 1,465/1,800 URLS (81%) with no mention of the exact key phrase.
Whereas Google Alerts delivered 157/331 URLS (47%) with no mention of the exact key phrase.
Indexed URL’s
I also wanted to see just how many URL’s were actually indexed by Google.
If a URL is indexed by Google this is a good quality metric to look at – because well, if its good enough to be in
Googles index, it must be high quality right… ^^

5. 60608080Amy BouzagloAmy BouzagloBuzzBundleBuzzBundleGenerate Traf f icGenerate Traf f icMatthew
WoodwardMatthew WoodwardMatthewWoodward.co.ukMatthewWoodward.co.ukTiered Link BuildingTiered Link
BuildingTotalsTotalsGoogle AlertsGoogle AlertsTalkWalkerTalkWalker
Google takes a clear lead here with a total of 80.36% of the URL’s reported in it’s index compared to just
53.89% of TalkWalker Alerts.
In Summary
So let’s wrap it up with a quick summary of the statistics-
40408080120120% Of Emails% Of Emails% Of Links Found% Of Links Found% Mention Keyword% Mention
Keyword% Missing Keyword% Missing Keyword% Indexed% Indexed% Not Indexed% Not IndexedGoogle
AlertsGoogle AlertsTalkWalkerTalkWalker
It is clear that both services perf orm pretty well and do exactly what they say on the tin.
However f rom the data above while TalkWalker Alerts f ound signif icantly more links – only 18% of those
mentioned the exact key phrase.
Further to that 46% of the links f ound by TalkWalker Alerts were not present in Googles index.
Choosing A Winner
Picking a winner depends on the goals you want to achieve.
If you are looking to monitor f or mentions of your brand, business, site, competitors and so f orth I would
suggest using Google Alerts & TalkWalker Alerts.
This is because out of the 2,131 URL’s returned by both services, only 1.87% of them were duplicates. Using
both services allows you to cast a much wider net.
If you are looking to just setup alerts to build links, engage your audience & drive targeted traf f ic as described
in this tutorial – then you probably want to stick with Google Alerts.
It provides much less noise and a much higher % of indexed URL’s which are perf ect to use f or link building and
driving traf f ic.
Advanced Tricks n Tips
Now you know which one you need to use – you just need to set things up!
Please see this much more detailed tutorial which shares a whole bunch of tips n tricks you can use Google
Alerts or TalkWalker Alerts f or.
Also take a look at my tutorial that teaches you how to engage your audience directly with your content – you
can use both of these tools to help you out there as well!
You can download the source data for this test here.