How to Set Up Google Alerts

Want to stay up to date with the conversation surrounding a particular topic, or perhaps monitor mentions of your brand on the internet? Google Alerts is a free tool that you can use to supplement your social listening. By setting up Google Alerts, you can receive email alerts on your specified topic on a daily, weekly, or as-it-happens basis. I use Google Alerts to stay up to date with the latest new features and news in the digital advertising and social media space and to monitor mentions of some of our clients outside of the social media conversation. 

The first step is to visit https://www.google.com/alerts. There you will see a search bar that prompts you to “Create an Alert about…”. Start typing your search query, just as you would on a normal google search. For example, you can type your company name, your own name, or an industry you want to keep up with.

Next, make sure to click the “Show Options” button to see the rest of the alert setup. 

You can select how often you want to get emails, if there is any particular area of the web that you are interested in, what language and location the results are in, and if you want to see only the best results or every single result Google can find. 

When you are done, click Create Alert. You can always go back later and make changes if needed. In fact, over time you will likely refine your alert to filter out irrelevant results or broaden it to receive more information. 

This is where some advanced search tips can come in handy. In general, you can use the same advanced search operators that you would use on a Google search on a Google Alert. Some common ones are: 

Using quotation marks to match an exact phrase. Keep in mind that this means that words in that phrase will need to come in that exact order to trigger an alert. This can be useful for names and brand names. 

Using AND or OR operators. Google defaults to the AND operator under normal circumstances, but you can still use it with other operators. 

Using parentheses () to group search terms together.

Using the dash or minus sign - to add negative keywords to exclude searches containing those terms. 

As you can see, there are lots of different ways to set up searches, and some queries can get quite long. As time goes on, you may decide to tweak your search based on the results you are seeing. 

A few final notes regarding Google Alerts. This free tool is not a catch-all like a press clipping service or full media monitoring tool. It also is not designed to catch all social mentions of your brand – at TPM, we use Sprout Social for that. But it can be a useful tool for monitoring for small businesses or for keeping track of the news in different industries.

Have a useful way of using Google Alerts? Let us know on our social media!