UPDATE: Rank Tracker is NOT being retired!

[GlennFerrell]

What I will have to duplicate in Campaigns is shown below.  I assume this will require 4 campaigns (but I've been too busy this morning to try it -- so I don't know if it can be covered.)

We track 95 site/keyword pairs (allow growth to 150)  with a breakdown as follows:

• Track 55 keywords for site A (but for no subdomains of that site.)
• Track 35 keywords for site B (a competitor site)'
• Track 2 keywords for site C (a competitor site)
• Track 1 keyword for site D (a competitor site)
• Rankings are updated once a week on Saturday (could be any consistent weekday) and manually downloaded by CSV to be tracked and charted in an internal spreadsheet. Everything after that (charting, tracking) is internal and customized. Weekly tracking is important to keep the focus on trends rather that being distracted by one-time outliers.

[moz_support]

Hey Glenn!

Most of that should be achievable with the campaign crawl. The only limitation might be item A, as we currently do not have a function to exclude specific subdomains. You might be able to block rogerbot in those subdomains' robots.txt file to prevent us from crawling those areas of the site.

Weekly tracking is the default timeframe for campaigns, so that should be no issue! If you want to control when the crawl happens, you can create your campaigns on the day before you wish to receive data (it takes ~24 hrs to process new crawl information and populate it in the campaign).

If you have any other questions about settings things up, feel free to reach to us at help@moz.com!

[vjgoel07]

Why not just migrate the existing retired stuff to campaigns?  You're making us do that work and destroying the history?

I see no compelling rationale as to why you've asked your users to do this (and probably mess it up) vs. automating a migration path.

[JimboF250]

This is a frustrating change...as the search manager of my company I get ad hoc queries from dozens of users a day asking for specific keyword data...should i use "xyz123" or "123xyz" in the blog post I am creating etc.  We do thorough keyword research for the majority of our pages but there are some opportunities that we have where the rank tracker is the perfect tool for these ad-hoc situations...I don't have 3 or 4 hours for a report to run.  Moz is a great tool, but this was a great feature.

[RCF]

I'm not sure whether I'm using Rank Tracker or Campaigns. How can I tell which one I'm using?

[prima-253509]

I haven't used Rank Tracker very much in the last year but it has historically been useful to look up keywords outside of the core keywords we are tracking in our campaigns. It is not just that the tool is going away, it is also that the quota is being reduced in terms of what you can track. We recently upgraded our subscription so that we could track more keywords but now, in order to mimic the functionality of the Rank Tracker tool I would have to keep some keywords free and in reserve so that campaigns could be created on an ad-hoc basis. i.e. our 750 keyword limit on the campaigns is now essentially 700 if I want to keep open spots for ad-hoc keyword research that had been provided by the rank tracker (tracked over time) or 550 if I wanted to keep open the 200 rankings available on the daily cap.

Campaign limits are also going to be hit in regards to tracking domains for a keyword phrase as you can only add three competitor sites per campaign. It just isn't as functional for ad-hoc research as the Keyword Ranking tool was.

Are quotas going to be increased on campaigns to compensate for this (keywords available / campaign spots available)?

This is disappointing as it seems like a lot of features are disappearing / being sunset while costs are staying the same. If I am missing something about quotas let me know. Thanks!

[prima-253509]

I should also add that the Keyword Explorer tool is awesome and one of the best things about Moz Pro. So kudos with that tool. Incorporating the rank tracker into the Keyword explorer would make sense to me from a UX point of view (more than just the first page, change over time, etc). Just a thought

[BlueprintMarketing]

If you use Rank Tracker for keyword tracking, you will need to add any keywords you would like to keep tracking to a Moz Pro campaign. You can create a new campaign or add keywords to an existing campaign by navigating to the Rankings tab and selecting Add & Manage Keywords.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Rember

If you use Rank Tracker for keyword tracking, you will need to add any keywords you would like to keep tracking to a Moz Pro campaign. You can create a new campaign or add keywords to an existing campaign by navigating to the Rankings tab and selecting Add & Manage Keywords.

[myke_larson]

Thanks Moz Crew for All You Do,

The pop up that served this upcoming change initially offered a thumb Up/Down vote, which I voted down. I've been on this platform for 5 years and this is consistently the ONE tool worth every penny of subscription. _There was a tool before that could be added to Firefox and I know I'm not the only one who has used it, which would do much the same unless Google decided to stop serving your ip address with results. It was free and it worked great when it worked. Firefox updates killed the add on I think just this past year, but it was not as reliable and consistent as the data here. _

While I've maintained campaigns in the past, I don't need to use them consistently. I don't need them like I need a lightweight real time keyword rank check. This is a DAILY tool for myself and others like me.

Keyword Explorer, while great for sorting, managing, maintaining lists and more, is just not enough with 'not on first page' being the rank of anything beyond 10. I'm sure I'm not the only analyst to go and fill in all of those spaces on the csv I export, with my results from the Rank Tracker. I've used the 200 available in a day before and had to wait for a reset. This is an incredibly important tool and I realize I may be in a minority opinion here.

The truth is that this removal doesn't streamline or make our lives easier as consultants and analysts. If you actively use a campaign to track a specific client you work with, great, by all means adjust your branded keywords and manage your tracking effectively for that client.

However, some of us use this tool for checking rankings in specific markets for potential clients and helping to gauge whether or not campaigns (whether my campaign or another company) is at all effective.

Link Explorer is an amazing step forward and I could not compliment the versatility enough. I look forward to the growth of this utility.

I'm hoping that this will be reconsidered or even replaced after all.

Myke

P.S. My phone camera died on this trip, this was the absolute last image I was able to manage. Moz On Folks and thanks for all the hard work Rand Fishkin.

aq1kvdQ

[andyferrett]

Has anyone found any alternatives to Moz yet, which provide daily rankings updates across multiple domains?

Many Thanks,

Andy

[moz_support]

Hi there Vijay,

Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately there is not a way to easily migrate that data on the backend, as they are pretty separate tools. Apologies for the inconvenience!

[tawnycase]

Hey there, 
Tawny from Moz's Help team here. 
I'm really sorry to hear that Rank Tracker going away is going to hit you so hard. I know that Campaign tracking isn't an ideal solution for ad hoc rank checking, but you can also use Keyword Explorer to see the first 10 SERP positions for any keyword (it's a live SERP report, so it fluctuates in real time).

I wish we had a better solution for those ad hoc searches you're describing. Please let us know if there's anything else we can do to help.

[tawnycase]

Hey there!

If your URL says "analytics" in it, you're using a Moz Pro Campaign, and you'll see a left-hand navigation panel. If you're using Rank Tracker, you'll be at this URL: https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker, and you'll just see Rank Tracker, no left-hand navigation.

I hope that helps! If you still have questions, feel free to give us a shout at help@moz.com.

[tawnycase]

Hi Joshua, 
Tawny from Moz's Help Team here.

I definitely understand where you're coming from with the loss of functionality. At this time we're not planning on increasing limits for Moz Pro subscriptions, but we're collecting all the feedback we can about retiring Rank Tracker before we make any final decisions about the future of the tools.

If you've still got any questions we can help with, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com.

[moz_support]

Thanks for the great feedback, Myke!

We definitely hear your need for a lightweight, on-demand ranking tool. The specifics around your use cases are extremely helpful, and our product team will be sure to take all of this into account. While we don't have an immediate replacement to announce for some of that functionality, we recognize that it's important to your process.

Thanks, and let us know if you have any additional feedback on how you currently use the tool!

[climber17]

I'm equally disappointed in the retirement of Rank Tracker.  Weekly updates of our most important 2-dozen keywords is fully inadequate for our purposes.  Using Keyword Lists is just not going to cut it.  Cumbersome and only reports if KW is in top 10.

Please keep Rank Tracker around, even if it is in a dark corner of the website where us long time customers can find it.

[moz_support]

Thanks for the feedback!

Right now all of our keyword tracking tools, including Rank Tracker are meant to update on a weekly basis. Rank Tracker was never meant to provide daily rankings, and the rankings it does show for daily checks are not accurate due to caching.

We do realize there is a gap for one-off checks that Rank Tracker was particularly good for. But we would love to hear more about the ways you used Rank Tracker, and what functionality it provided that was valuable to your workflow. Thanks!

[Eluscious.com]

I understand that I can add keywords to campaigns, but how can I make a report of these keywords and show the positions of the pages in Google? This was a piece of cake in the Rank Tracker, but I have no idea how to use it now.

Rank Tracker is one of the main reasons we use MOZ, so if you don't offer a solution to this issue, I am affraid we have to look for another SEO monitoring tool.

I just need to watch the development of our Search Engine positions on a weekly basis.

[vital_hike]

The benefit of rank tracker is the speed with which I can quickly check on a keyword idea that I have for client who we have not yet signed up or just an idea that comes into my head. The benefits to being able to process my idea quickly by jumping onto Rank Tracker without the need to laboriously go through a campaign has been enormous. The convenience of quickly checking a keyword position to get that information is superb. I dont always want to have a campaign running in order to get ranking data. We reularly check something quickly and it tended to be one off situations. We are more than happy with the tracking within a full blown campaign but removing this is not helpful because i dont see this functionality elsewhere.

We also use this as a quick tool to get us data for a meeting or discussing with prospective new clients when short of time. Sometimes even in real time while talking on the phone. They are always impressed. Sadly missed!!!