UPDATE: Rank Tracker is NOT being retired!

[kikikuchin]

Update: Thank you all for your open and honest feedback about our planned retirement of Rank Tracker. Our product team has taken all of it to heart, discussed some alternatives, and has made the decision NOT to retire Rank Tracker at this time.

Instead, we want to learn more from you about what makes this tool so useful for you and your business. From what we learn in this survey, we will take steps to design a better solution for you than simply shutting it down.

Please take this Rank Tracker survey!

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Hello!

I am a product manager on the Moz Pro team, and I want to let you know about an upcoming change to Moz Pro.

On June 8th, 2018, we are retiring Rank Tracker, one of our tools for tracking keyword rankings.

Why?

We want to make Moz Pro easier to navigate and use. Right now, Moz has two tools that allow you to track keyword rankings: Rank Tracker and Campaigns. We’ve talked to a lot of customers and overwhelming feedback has been that this is just plain confusing. We agree.

Don’t worry! You can still use Moz Pro for all your rank tracking and keyword research.

Campaigns is the primary tool you should be using to track your keyword rankings and Keyword Explorer is your go-to to discover and prioritize the best keywords to target.

What do Rank Tracker users need to know?

• To keep a record of your tracked keyword history, you will need to export your tracked history to CSV.

• If you have opted-in to receive weekly ranking emails for your tracked keywords, you will no longer receive these email alerts after June 1st, 2018.

What should I do now?

If you are not using Rank Tracker then this change does not impact you one bit. 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.

If you have any more questions or feedback, please leave it in the comments below.

Thanks!

Kiki

[LureCreative]

Great to see a company actually adjusting to the needs of their users in a timely fashion. Well done Moz and I am really loving the new Moz Link Explorer as well! Keep up the awesome tools and SEO articles!

[garrettn]

Thank you for reconsidering this. Rank Tracker was useful to me as a solo SEO consultant for new client prospecting. Having a lightweight tool, I can use to check rankings on an ad-hoc basis was invaluable. I haven't thought about this in great detail, but it seems like the Rank Checker could fit into Keyword Explorer, if you added extra functionality, such as tracking more than just the first ten SERP positions. The ten position limitation is one reason why I don't use the rank checker in Keyword Explorer.

[IanWatson]

We will ensure that we are able to satisfy the needs of users before we look to remove any tool. Really appreciate all of the info shared in this thread and in the survey. The voice of you, the customer, is what really matters to us at Moz.

[IanWatson]

Hey Rick,

It should be back in the navigation. Please let me know if you are not seeing it there.

[togardergrosse]

I'm really happy that you guys decided to postpone the retirement (hopefully never) of Rank Tracker.

Already filled-in the survey, and hope many of us will do the survey too, so MOZ will really understand why we need this feature.

Again, many thanks for hearing our voices.

Best regards.

[andyferrett]

Great news, thanks Ian. At Brightec we use Rank Tracker on a daily basis.

[rickyp04]

Is Rank Tracker going to be added back to the menu under 'Moz Pro'?

[IanWatson]

Hey everyone!

As the Update of this post states, we have decided to not retire Rank Tracker until we can fully support the functionality it provides to you and your workflows.

Really do appreciate all of the feedback and we are hopeful you will provide a bit more in the Rank Tracker survey. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any other questions or concerns.

[moz_support]

Hi there!

You have a few different options for creating a report from your campaign's tracked keywords. The easiest is to set up a Custom Report, which will automatically generate on a weekly or monthly basis. You can read more about setting those up here: https://moz.com/help/guides/moz-pro-overview/custom-reports

You can also download your historical keyword ranking CSV from within your campaign at any time. Just head to the Rankings section and scroll down to the Tracked Keywords Overview, then find the button to export the CSV.

If you have any questions about setting any of that up, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com.

[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!!!

[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.

[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!

[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 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!

[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.

[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]

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.

[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!

[andyferrett]

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

Many Thanks,

Andy

[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

[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.

[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.

[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

[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!

[RCF]

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

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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 there Glenn! Thanks for your feedback.

As Kiki mentioned in her post, we have two tools that currently provide rankings - Rank Tracker and Campaigns. Campaigns are far and away the most robust way to track keywords for a client over time. We automatically recollect keyword rankings once per week within the Campaign, and offer customized reporting options for a wide range of keyword data views. Campaigns also have a complete historical rankings CSV that you can download at any time. Was there a particular use case you had for Rank Tracker that the keyword tracking within Campaigns is not able to cover?

[GlennFerrell]

Rank Tracker is the sole reason we purchased Moz Pro.  We track ranks for keywords for a client and their top competitor, update them every Saturday, download the CSV and import into a spreadsheet that displays Six Sigma run charts. For about five years monthly presentation of these charts has been used to drive content changes.

What is driving this decision?

[tawnycase]

Hey there! You can find Rank Tracker here until June 8th: https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker

Hope that helps! If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com.

[Chicagofan]

I can not find rank tracker. Is it going to be retired on June 8 or today?

[meghanpahinui]

Hi Steven,

Thanks so much for reaching out with your feedback. We’re sorry for any inconvenience. If you’re looking to check live rankings for specific keywords and pages or sites, you can use Keyword Lists to accomplish this. Here, you can check any URL to see if it is in the top 10 positions for the keywords in your list.

Another tool you may find useful is the Analyze a Keyword section of your Campaigns. Within this tool, we’ll show you a live SERP with the top 50 rankings sites for any keyword you’re tracking in your Campaign.

Again, we’re so sorry for any inconvenience this may be causing but we do hope to continue to bring you better and more accurate tools in the future like our new Link Explorer tool and the updates to our Keyword explorer tool.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to send an email on over to help@moz.com!

[dave.kudera]

Hey Jason, sorry for the inconvenience!

Rank tracker was never really intended for daily keyword rankings, which is the reason you had to do the tedious manually updating and even then there was some caching involved.  I will certainly pass along your frustration with our product team.  Let us know if you we can do anything to help make this transition easier!

[meghanpahinui]

Hi there!

Thanks so much for reaching out with your feedback! We're sorry for any inconvenience. If you're looking to track keywords for specific, simple pages, you can use Keyword Lists as an alternative rather than Campaigns. There, you can check any URL to see if it is coming up in the top 10 positions. I have a guide here which can help get you started with that tool.

You can also use Keyword Explorer to see what keywords your specific pages and sites are already ranking for and compare them to other sites.

Hopefully these suggestions helps! If you have any other questions or concerns, feel free to email us at help@moz.com. We're always here to help!

[tawnycase]

Sorry to hear you're disappointed, Andry!

You can still use a Moz Pro Campaign to track keyword rankings over time — you'll just need to set up a Campaign to track the site whose rankings you'd like to see. You can also use Keyword Explorer to find out what keywords that site is already ranking for!

Give us a shout at help@moz.com if there's anything else we can help with.

[moz_support]

Hey there! Sorry for any inconvenience here.

Unfortunately Rank Tracker was never super great at those daily rankings. There was some cached data involved, and it was never meant to be a full solution for daily ranking updates. We will be sure to let our product team know you'd like to see a daily ranking solution within the Moz tools.

Feel free to let us know if you have any other questions!

[moz_support]

Hi there,

Thanks for following up with your feedback! At the moment, we don't have an immediate replacement for Rank Tracker in place, but as you mentioned we do have several places where you can check rankings. One would be in the Campaign, especially the Analyze a Keyword section which allows you to view the live SERP with the top 50 ranking sites. Another way to check live rankings is using Keyword Explorer. If you have a Keyword List there, you can check any URL for presence in the top 10 positions.

Another workaround for quick rankings gatherings would be to create a Campaign and add those keywords during setup. We'll do a quick rush collection and within a few hours you should see those results. You can then delete or archive that campaign if you no longer need it.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused by the removal of Rank Tracker. We have hopes to bring you better, faster, more accurate tools in the future (such as the brand new Link Explorer!), and we will certainly let the product team know that on-demand rank checking is high on your list.

Let us know if there's anything else we can do for you!

[togardergrosse]

I'm also on the lookout. Please inform us if you found other service that offer similar services. Thanks!

[misterfla]

I concur with the other comments. We use Rank Tracker to track keywords for certain pages on our sites. This was an important part of our need for Moz, since the Campaigns tool does not do this. Given the exorbitant cost we pay for the Moz service, now that this isn't part of your service, we may have to look elsewhere.

[Adworkz-120968]

It is bad enough that unlike most SEO tool suites, one has to manually update each keyword in Rank Tracker for daily tracking.  Removing the ability to track daily rankings renders MOZ useless to me. I will be cancelling my membership in favor of a tool that does.

[togardergrosse]

The benefit of a specific Rank Tracker feature is so we could track a specific keyword anytime.

This is a bad decision.

[andyferrett]

Shame, we use rank tracker to be able to track keywords outside of a Campaign and be able to see the change on a daily basis. Sounds like I'll need to find another tool to be able to do this.

[Supportflex]

To bad there will be no lightweight keyword tracking available. We use this to track keywords for some simple pages (action websites, single page websites etc) in which case using an campaign would be an overkill and quite expenisive. We max out on campaigns pretty fast. The low number of campaigns in the plans is making this a bit call imho.

[Toke-vt]

Hi Kiki,

I'm currently using the Rank Tracker as a way to get the rank of a certain page on a set of keywords, in order to determine which keywords to use. When adding new keywords to a campaign, it takes up to a week before I get the rankings. Without the Rank Tracker, how will I be able to get my ranking score on keywords within minutes?