Those of you who were interested saw the preliminary data from Tracer. Well, the longer-term data didn't change significantly and I've decided to remove Tracer from the site.

Even I found the "read more at" links added to any text I copied in to be a pain in the butt after a while. Most of the time I just had to remove it because it wasn't appropriate to the e-mail or document I was composing. So that was the downside.

As for the upside... the very limited reporting and inability to mine the data with any depth limited its utility. The utility was further limited by the severe lack of documentation to help you interpret and understand even the "just scratching the surface" information that Tracer provides. And based on their linkback data for the top 20 pages, the "read more at" addition to the clipboard on copies wasn't providing me with any extra backlinks.

Do I see a potential benefit in it if they were to document it better and beef up the "drill down" functionality of their reporting? Yes. Do I see it getting wider adoption if they make the "read more at" clipboard insert optional based on the site owner's preferences? Yes.

Mainly Tracer just confirmed some suspicions but didn't provide many surprises. Overall, it's promising, but it needs a round or two of upgrades to both its interface and its documentation before it's really a prime time tool for webmasters.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 11:57 am and is filed under Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.