If you are a blog publisher or business owner, tracking what people are saying about you is an important part of business. So what’s the best tools out there for keeping track of your online buzz?

I’ve recently been playing around with some tools to help track the effectiveness of our blog. I decided to post the results of what I found was hot, and what was not. My tests for these services was to simple – put in our domain name and check where we are linked from. I also compared the results against other sources to see which had the most accurate and useful results.

For mentions from around the web

• Technorati has proven to be a great source for following blog conversations. Their UI has drastically improved over the last year and since we’ve started using it regularly I found it to be a fairly good experience. They have all the goodies, such as creating a watchlist, subscribing to searches via RSS, and a Firefox extension. I also found them to be one of the more accurate blog search tools out there, returning a good number of hits for my test domains.

• Talk Digger is a good service that aggregates searches across a number of sites. It pulls together Digg, Technorati, Google and a host of others. It also allows you to click on each service to see just the results from that service. Talk Digger is another great source for subscribing to via RSS.

• Wink is a social search engine with a twist. It allows the community to rate on the results. Wink did a good job, coming up with a detailed list of results. As a bonus you can see of any of your posts were rated by wink members.

• Google is great for finding all the general backlinks to your site. To use it, just type in ‘link:mysite.com’ and it will report all the backlinks it has in the index. However because of our domain name switch, we aren’t in their index at the moment. It still works for our original domain, but is a good resource none-the-less.

• Yahoo is just as useful for tracking links to your site as Google. However it as one up on the big ‘G’ by allowing to subscribe to a search as an RSS feed. It’s not readily apparent, but type in your site, and when you see the results the RSS icon will light up in your favorite…non IE…browser.

• socialmeter is an interesting tool that checks your links in a number of locations and gives you an overall score. Google, digg, Technorati and the like are all present and accounted for. The ability to grab an RSS feed is handy as it allows you to follow whether your score is rising or falling. I’m a little skeptical on how accurate the scores are though. My Technorati score was much higher on socialmeter than on Technorati itself.

• BlogPulse is a decent blog search engine. It has a nice trending feature which will give you a graph of the search results for your site domain. The downside is BlogPulse returns much fewer results than Technorati does, so the accuracy of even the graph may not be very useful. For very heavily trafficked sites this is ok, since a trend is a trend. However for smaller sites the accuracy makes a bigger impact.

• IceRocket is another blog search tool. I did not like this one, and found to have the lowest accuracy compared to Technorati and BlogPulse. It did have a trend feature, but again, it’s lack of hits for the same searches made me not trust it. If your looking for tools like this, you’ll definitely run across it, but don’t bother.

• Sphere was the worst of all of them. Just completely skip it. It was pathetic in the number of results it came up with for my test sites.

For General Traffic and referrers

• Alexaholic.com is based off the popular Alexa.com. It extends Alexa by allowing you to put in multiple sites and compare them side-by-side. Overall it’s by far the coolest way to see your traffic and compare it to others. Thumbs up for the small thumbnails they have at the bottom as well

• Google Analytics has been a staple for our metrics. I’ve had trouble with it, but it does work, and is a good backup source for information on your referrers and search terms. It’s a little difficult to get to the referrers themselves, which is the meat of what you want in tracking buzz, but it is there alongside a lot of other good information.

• Measure Map is pretty much the easiest way for me to see our referrers. I’ve been a beta tester from the day they started, and so far this has been my staple for stats. a huge thumbs up for the ability to select a single post and view all the links it brought in. This is very useful for measure your effectiveness on a post by post basis.

Tracking Comments

If you happen to find a blog post through the above tools, these comment trackers let you follow the aftermath and keep tabs on the conversation. I haven’t experimented too much with any of them yet, but thay are certainly worth mentioning when it comes to tracking buzz.

• Commentful
• coComment
• co.mments

References

• 10 things you should be monitoring

I’ll admit there are certainly quite a few of these alternate search engines, and I tend to wonder the viability of having so many services all tackling the same problem. In the end, I’ll probably stick with one or two and that’s all I’ll ever need along with the big ‘G’. How about you? Any of these services your favorite? Is there one you use on a regular basis that’s missing from the list?

UPDATE: Added ’socialmeter’ to the list.

Published on September 3, 2006
Resides in Web Technologies

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25 Responses to “Tracking your buzz”

1. 1

   niko on September 6th, 2006

   Where’s blogdigger.com ?

2. 2

   Ryan Nichols on September 6th, 2006

   Good question. I checked it out about a week ago, but a number of domains didn’t show up at all for me. Since most other places did, I felt it wasn’t worth the mention.

   I also didn’t want to create the ‘all encompassing link list of all time’, just a list of what works well, and a few of the big players that should work well but don’t.

3. 3

   cybele on September 6th, 2006

   MeasureMap isn’t accepting new registrations right now, but it looks interesting.

4. 4

   Ryan Nichols on September 6th, 2006

   Yeah, I don’t know exactly what the hold up is. It’s been quite a while since they were bought. Though I’ve heard from a little birdie that they are working on some great new features, so hopefully it will come out with a bang.

5. 5

   links for 2006-09-07 « Sanjeev.NET on September 6th, 2006

   […] Tracking your buzz (tags: buzz 2do) […]

6. 6

   Alex Williams on September 6th, 2006

   I know they have faded a bit but Feedster still works for me quite well. REsults are often different than what I get at Technorati. And as far as tracking feeds, I’d consider adding Feedburner to the list.

7. 7

   BoardTracker on September 7th, 2006

   There’s also boardtracker.com for tracking buzz on message boards and forums!

8. 8

   Fred on September 7th, 2006

   Hi,

   Thank you for including Talk Digger in your list, it is really gratifying.

   If you, or some of your readers, tested it and found bugs, things they don’t like, or things they would like to see (missing information, a new layout gadget, or anything else), I would like to be notified. That way, I will be able to enhance the service accordingly to users’ wishes.

   Thanks you!

   Take care,

   Fred

9. 9

   Easton Ellsworth on September 7th, 2006

   I love coComment. It has become my one-stop comment tracking solution.

10. 10

    links for 2006-09-07 at edsmiley.com on September 7th, 2006

    […] Tracking your buzz (tags: blog search tips) […]

11. 11

    ariel on September 7th, 2006

    Don’t forget that a great number of us also use Site Meter - mind you, no clean web 2.0 design or Google sponsorship, but it works quite well.

12. 12

    NaturalBirthing.info » Blog Archive » Track your buzz on September 8th, 2006

    […] Really, a super useful list of buzz-trackers that I plan on checking out. What do you find are the best ways to track your buzz? Thoughts to comments or to tips at lifehacker.com. — Wendy Boswell Tracking Your Buzz [Apples to Oranges] […]

13. 13

    nicozorn.com » Archiv » Ein paar Links am Sonntag on September 10th, 2006

    […] applestooranges.com: Tracking your Buzz Eine umfangreiche Sammlung an Tools, mit denen Online-Mundpropaganda ausgewertet werden kann. […]

14. 14

    Tell Ten Friends» Blog Archive » Tracking Your Online Buzz 101 on September 10th, 2006

    […] It lays out all of the best tools for tracking your online buzz. I’ve been asked about this quite a bit, so it’s nice to see a definitive list of tools that can give you a barometer of what’s being said about you online. […]

15. 15

    Propagate Online Public Relations Blog » Blog Archive » Checking Out the Brand on November 3rd, 2006

    […] A social media audit doesn’t have to cost a fortune with data-mining firm, although such spending is often justified, in my opinion. There are many resources on the web to track buzz and one can quickly become good at using them. In fact the process is a lot easier than going to the library looking for clips. Apples to Oranges has a good compendium of tracking resources. Check it out. brand, Good practice, Internet PR, media, Strategy […]

16. 16

    A to Z of World on November 27th, 2006

    Gr8 List.
    I really do agree with you on keeping technorati at the top of the list. They are the best trackers of your blog. I never thought my blog can pass 2k hits just in 2 months. That is a sure thanks to technorati. But one thing I found about technorati (not about tracking but about getting traffic) is that you get traffic from it (most of the times)only if you got the top search terms included somehow and somewhere in the posts. But google is good in this matter. It brings me arround 10 to 15 hits a day no matter I’v the latest things posted or not.

17. 17

    harrison on April 7th, 2007

    Thanx for info and advice it was very helpful

18. 18

    Laura on August 19th, 2007

    Very useful list. Another one you might be interested in is http://www.domainlogbook.com/, it gives you your google and alexa ranks at a glance.

19. 19

    nandockadlY on October 5th, 2007

    Привет.
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    Всё чисто, не одной жалоб. Сделан на утерянные документы. Всё законно.
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20. 20

    nandockadlY on October 7th, 2007

    Привет.
    Продаю персональный сертификат WebMoney за $99.

    Можете проверить: WMID 322973398779 Redfern

    Всё чисто, не одной жалоб. Сделан на утерянные документы. Всё законно.
    Если нужно, то есть сертификаты ещё.
    Стучацо в личную почту на Вебмани.

    Это не спам. Не пишите на мой WMID жалобы в арбитраж Вебмани.

21. 21

    Find out what’s being said online about your org on March 31st, 2008

    […] to Oranges offers tips on “Tracking Your Buzz” from around the web. Learn the amount of traffic and who it’s coming from in addition […]

22. 22

    Find out what’s being said online about your org « Think Tank Tech on April 7th, 2008

    […] am on April 8, 2008 | # | Apples to Oranges offers tips on “Tracking Your Buzz” from around the web. Learn the amount of traffic and who it’s coming from in addition […]

23. 23

    Tips on finding out what’s being said online about your org :: Think Tank Tech on June 23rd, 2008

    […] to Oranges offers tips on “Tracking Your Buzz” from around the web. Learn the amount of traffic and who it’s coming from in addition […]

24. 24

    Sandy Cheeks on July 1st, 2008

    Very nice article and helpful.

25. 25

    Tips on finding out what’s being said online about your org | Atlas Network on October 7th, 2008

    […] to Oranges offers tips on “Tracking Your Buzz” from around the web. Learn the amount of traffic and who it’s coming from in addition […]

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