Forum Moderators: DixonJones
1. We run it daily and have had no problem with the SE's. WPG seems to go out of its way to keep the SE's unruffled. There's a "slow" setting for being less spammy and you can further slow it by specifying any pauses you want between requests. They also cooperate with Google by using the Google API (rather, by using YOUR API license).
2. The Scheduler is great, very reliable.
3. Be sure to go through the setup slowly and carefully; there are some good little features in there.
4. I have been unhappy with its accuracy from time to time but lately it's been better. A lot better. In fact, just about perfect (I check this carefully). It keeps a snapshot of the results pages in case you want to make sure it's reporting correctly on what it sees.
5. An undocumented source of error is the "Report only on the best-performing page on my site" toggle. Turning this on causes problems if you want more than one column of numbers (i.e. if you want "nonsponsored" ranks as well as "sponsored-unsponsored combined" ranks). Just don't use this setting, that's the answer. I don't think WPG themselves even knew about this until recently because I've been bothering them about inaccuracy for about a year and they just finally came up with this reason, as if they'd just discovered it.
6. They have a Trends report, a legacy report, that also is completely inaccurate if you want both "combined" and "nonsponsored." Unfortunately, turning the setting I mentioned in #5 off does NOT fix this. Ignore their Trends report. Instead export to Excel.
7. It does NOT report on your paid ranks. I see this as a big drawback, but the PPC engines provide moderately adequate stats for this, so it might be expendable.
8. It has a really good export feature to Excel, and recently improved it in the form of pivot table export. This is fantastic for deep analysis and trending, and saves hours of Excel manipulation.
9. The positive points I've described outweigh, for me, the negative points by a long shot. It has saved many hours. It's worth the money to be able to document ranks like this to customers, especially if you trend it graphically with Excel and do other tricks. But as I said, I have no experience with its competitors.
10. One last note - don't rely on WPG developers or QA to notice when search engines change format and throw off their accuracy. I am not sure they check this regularly, believe it or not. Give them a call or an email with screen shots and keep the product working properly for all of us. (Calling the Sales line gets you results far, far sooner than calling the tech support line, I should add.)
Thanks for the advise too, will help to all us budding trackers :)
Back in 2000 - 2001 it was great for making doorway pages that would get you #1 though :)
Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™
DerekH
WPG now has the ability to use your own API key as of a few months ago.
Then I stopped - thought about it and decided to enter a second domain - that of a competition site that is ranked consistantly number 1 on google and high on other engines. There were more change suggestions for that site than for mine, so my wallet stayed in my pocket.
Not sure about how good or bad it is, this is just my experience.
