1 - It doesn't find things as-they-happen. 2 - It doesn't monitor social media.3 - It doesn't have many integrations.4 - It doesn't support webhooks.5 - It doesn't have SMS notifications.6 - It doesn't give you an easy way to filter your results.7 - It doesn't have customer service.8 - It's not improving.Check out PMAlerts!

This post was inspired by Plausible's Why you should stop using Google Analytics.

This is Google Alerts:

It's a free Google product that lets you "monitor the web for interesting new content". It has some strengths:

It's easy to use.
It offers alert result previews.
It offers easy-to-use RSS.
Since you probably already have a Google account, you don't need to sign up for yet another service. It just works.

But it also has some weaknesses. Let's talk about them, and how PMAlerts addresses each.

1 - It doesn't find things as-they-happen.

Google Alerts depends on Google's web crawler, which means that you have to wait for Google's web crawler to find things before Google Alerts will notify you [1].

Google's crawler isn't meant to support an alerting tool, so it's not optimized for speed. Google Alerts has to wait for Google's crawler to find things:

This can be a problem if you're using your alerts to manage customer relationships, because response times matter. According to this study by Arise, 81% of respondents expected their emails to be answered within 24 hours. The 2020 Sprout Social Index contains similar findings for communications on social media: 79% of consumers expect a response time within 24 hours of reaching out [2].

I built PMAlerts to help you engage, so it's optimized to find things as quickly as possible. It asks Google for results, but it also asks social media platforms directly, dozens of times throughout the day [3]:

This means that you can use PMAlerts to capture relevant conversations just about as soon as they happen, which gives you an easy way to exceed customer expectations.

Using Google Alerts is like standing on top of a tower to monitor activity. You'll catch the big stuff after it's happened, but if you want to get on the ground and engage with people who you can help, PMAlerts can help you.

2 - It doesn't monitor social media.

Google Alerts isn't telling you about a lot of relevant conversations happening on social media.

I built PMAlerts to solve this problem. It monitors the following sources by default:

You can even select the Custom option to monitor a specific website, or the entire internet (but be careful with this option - the internet is a big place!).

3 - It doesn't have many integrations.

Google Alerts sends notifications via email and RSS, but nothing else.

If you're using PMAlerts for customer service, you probably want to share relevant results with your peers, or maybe even assign them as work items.

PMAlerts makes this easy: if you mention @PMAlerts on Slack, Telegram, Teams, or Discord, PMAlerts will share results within your conversation(s) [4]:

You can use this button to try it in Slack, but it's being reviewed by Slack right now, so you'll be warned that it's not an official app:

4 - It doesn't support webhooks.

Google Alerts doesn't make it easy to send results into your systems via webhooks.

It might be useful if your alert results were automatically forwarded into a custom workflow that you manage. You might feed them into your own sentiment analysis tools, project management software, database, or even a live feed hooked up to a television screen. Webhooks make this sort of thing easy:

With a single click, you can tell PMAlerts to push new results into your app whenever it finds things. Read the webhooks guide to see how easy it is.

5 - It doesn't have SMS notifications.

Time is of the essence! If you're monitoring Quora for questions about your area of expertise, you want to be the first person to answer. A text message can help cut through the noise of traditional app and email notifications - and PMAlerts makes it easy to set that up on a per-alert basis.

6 - It doesn't give you an easy way to filter your results.

You might want to filter out results that contain spammy language or bad words. PMAlerts makes custom filtering easy:

It gives you three types of filtering:

Content filtering: This can be useful if you want to filter out specific words or phrases.
Domain filtering: This can be useful if you're monitoring the entire web and want to filter out results from specific websites.
Username filtering: This can be useful if you want to mute results being published by a specific user.

This is how it looks in the app:

7 - It doesn't have customer service.

If you have a problem with Google Alerts, who do you call? If you have a feature request, where do you submit it? PMAlerts has an accessible human being behind it who's incentivized to care about your needs.

8 - It's not improving.

Google Alerts hasn't changed much over the past ten years. Any improvements made to Google Alerts would probably yield a relatively low return on Google's investment when compared to their core portfolio of advertising products. Google might actually be more incentivized to kill Google Alerts and reallocate their resources to more clearly profitable endeavors [5].

There are alternatives to Google Alerts [6], but they target enterprise consumers. They're either super expensive or bundled with other things that you probably don't need.

PMAlerts was built to do one thing, really well: listen to the internet. It's not brand management software, or an analytics suite, or a post scheduler, or an enterprise collaboration tool. It's a social listening tool!

Check out PMAlerts!

PMAlerts is simple, easy to try, and free to use for anyone who can't afford it. It's also experimenting towards a cooperative ownership model - so if you're into coops, unions, economic sustainability, or full-stack democracy [7], you'll feel good about using PMAlerts.

How can this post improve? Feel free to drop a comment below.