I have nothing but respect for Andy Beal; he “gets” online marketing and his wisdom should be heeded.

After reading about Andy Beal’s latest venture, Trackur, on ProBlogger, I decided to give it a spin. Trackur is similar to Google Alerts - it’s reputation management software.

Trackur has some obvious advantages over Google Alerts, some of which are outlined on Trackur’s FAQ page:

• Trackur can cover data sources outside of Google’s Index;
• Trackur has a more sophisticated management, web-based interface (Google Alerts just uses email;)
• Trackur allows you to store a history of alerts, whereas for Google you have to keep holding onto emails; and
• Trackur shows you a larger list of sources that mention your keywords - Google Alerts only shows you up to five items that appear in a 24-hour period.

Those are the purported advantages, but having actually used the software at work for a couple of days, I can tell you that Trackur didn’t meet the bare minimum of my expectations for enterprise-level reputation management software. Allow me to elaborate.

Trackur has No Intelligent “Noise Filters”

One of the convenient things about Google Alerts is that, more often than not, it separates the noise from the information. Sure, I get plenty of alerts for spammy scraper sites, but at least Google Alerts saves me from having to read hideously obvious alerts.

A quick example: one of my roles as the Social Media Manager for SmartDraw.com is to stick my finger in the wind and discover blogs that are talking about SmartDraw, so naturally I have to use some sort of reputation management software. When I used Trackur for the phrase “SmartDraw” I got a whole list of results:

Oh, cool! Lots of results! Let’s see who’s talking about SmartDraw…

Oh. The first four or five results are for PR Wire sites, some blogs, and a lot of cracked copies of our software. However, the majority of the results on the page are from our own website.

My Google Alert for “SmartDraw” doesn’t send me emails about every new page we put up on SmartDraw.com or every new blog entry that I write on Working Smarter. Google Alerts might on occasion, Google Alerts isn’t great either, but 99% of the time it only shows me information collected from external websites.

Irrelevant Publication Dates

My next beef with Trackur is the dates - all of the dates for articles that Trackur found about SmartDraw are set to the date that Trackur discovered the article, not when it was published. Pardon me for sounding snarky, but I don’t think a blog posts blasting an ancient version of our software is worthy of my attention here in 2008.

The problem is that Trackur’s index just isn’t as comprehensive or historic as Google’s, and I’m sure this is an issue that will be eliminated with time and an increase in Trackur’s adoption over time.

While I think that Trackur is a good concept and attempts to fulfill an essential need for media managers and marketers like me, I think that charging $197 a month for a service that doesn’t offer substantially greater value than Google Alerts is just asking for trouble.

A Suggestion

Trackur is, at its core, a networked service - the first few times a keyword is searched on Trackur, all of the data is meaningless because it’s the first time that the service has discovered the content. This will stop people like me, people who are willing and able to pay for the service from ever using it.

If I get a bunch of meaningless data during my 14-day trial I’m not going to bother subscribing to the service down the road. So I have some suggestions for Andy Beal to remedy the problems with Trackur:

• Add Some URL Noise Control- If I’m searching for articles about SmartDraw then I don’t want to read any articles written by SmartDraw.com - because that means we wrote them. Make a filter for URLs in addition to keywords.
• Parse Out Publication Dates When Possible - Most blogs have publication dates for entries - parse them out and help make Trackur’s data more meaningful.
• Give Out the Service Free for a Few Months - In order to make Trackur’s data meaningful, it has to be pulled for long periods of time in order to differentiate new content containing the keyword from the old. Why not extend the trial to last for a few months such that the timeline of data in Trackur’s system becomes more meaningful? Either that or just keep tracking searched keywords from the trial and send out a complimentary Google Alerts-style email months later with some helpful, meaningful results. Lure your trial users back in after the fact and say “hey, we kept following your keywords and here’s what we found!”

On that note, it’s Friday - I have about 4 other Marketing-Ninja posts that I’ve wanted to write this week but haven’t had time. I’ll see if I can get some up this weekend. Feel free to follow the festivities on Marketing Ninja’s Twitter account.

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