I don’t know about you, but when I heard that Andy Beal, of MarketingPilgrim, announced that he developed a new tool to replace Google Alerts and the many, many other tools that we use to track client mentions, I thought it was too soon for Christmas again. I’ve spent only a day or so testing Trackur, but wanted to give my first impressions and will update as I test more.

Just like you, we’ve been using Google Alerts to track keywords and names; getting the daily or twice-daily email. But we’ve always wanted an affordable tool that would send us RSS feeds and allow us to sort and save as we’d like. We’ve also rigged up countless feeds and alerts to catch the other mentions that Google misses. So when the news came that we could have a tool that put all these tools together with RSS, we couldn’t believe.

You have 3 options: Standard, with 1 saved search and updates every 12 hours at $88 per month; Pro, with 5 saved searches and updates every 6 hours at $188 per month; and Enterprise with 15 saved searches and updates every hour at $388 per month.

I found it fairly easy to set up, and within the 5 minutes that Andy promises; however, I would have appreciated an example search to help me along as I filled out my first query. They do provide an example, but it’s on a different page that really doesn’t help in the moment. There’s a lot of white space on the page that could be used to guide users.

I tested a few searches for “online reputation management” to see what sources were being tracked but didn’t see the usual suspects that normally post on ORM issues. I didn’t see Search Engine Land, which had a few blog posts on the subject just this month alone – none of those posts were in my results. Puzzling…. Then I tested my new favorite brand – Zicam – to see if the few recent posts that I, along with Tamar Weinberg have posted, and again nothing came up.  As for the other results, it was nice to see images and video, however the relevancy and importance of those were non existent. I only had 17 relevant results from the 63 total results in my first search.  It was a lot of work to comb through those results and determine what was relevant and what wasn’t.

Nice features:

• Add to favorites
• Share this article
• Sort newest to oldest
• Sort alphabetically
• Get updates via email and RSS

Wish list for future release:

• More complete list of sources
• Exportable results for Excel
• Ability to tag within tool (you can do this in your Reader)
• Some sort of relevancy meter
• I’ll think of some more as I test…

Bottom Line – I’m happy to see a tool to replace the boring old Google Alert and can’t wait to test this more in my 14 day trial and sign up for an ongoing service.