Advanced Web Ranking is an online rank tracker suitable for both Digital Agencies and In-house SEOs. The tool boasts usrse among more than 18,000 companies worldwide, and provides ranking results.
$99
per month
SSIS
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a data integration solution.
If you want a reliable and accurate keyword rank tracking tool that can spit out beautiful monthly reports for your clients, then AWR is the tool for you. It is also cloud-based so you don't have to deal with the issues of proxies and VPNs like you would if running a similar program from your own server. It's not the cheapest option but it's probably the easiest to implement and most accurate option when it comes to cloud-based rank tracking software. Customer support has always been responsive and pleasant to deal with, I haven't had many issues, but have always had a good experience when I needed support.
Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.
The ability of the program to produce dashboards in web page format. While it can do this, it saves them out as HTML files on your hard drive or cloud server, which makes it super hard to share with others.
The cloud version is a bit more expensive, which offers the same tools as the desktop, which I found a little troublesome and it didn't make sense to me.
Their customer service was a little lacking. I had a couple of general questions and I was on hold for about 15 minutes...which isn't good when you're in the middle of a busy workday.
SSIS has been a bit neglected by Microsoft and new features are slow in coming.
When importing data from flat files and Excel workbooks, changes in the data structure will cause the extracts to fail. Workarounds do exist but are not easily implemented. If your source data structure does not change or rarely changes, this negative is relatively insignificant.
While add-on third-party SSIS tools exist, there are only a small number of vendors actively supporting SSIS and license fees for production server use can be significant especially in highly-scaled environments.
Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure
SQL Server Integration Services is a relatively nice tool but is simply not the ETL for a global, large-scale organization. With developing requirements such as NoSQL data, cloud-based tools, and extraordinarily large databases, SSIS is no longer our tool of choice.
Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.
The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.
The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools
BrightEdge is a lot more expensive, but we began using it when funds allowed us to, primarily for the online reporting and features not found in Advanced Web Ranking. But, as I mentioned earlier, we did not stop using Advanced Web Ranking when we introduced BrightEdge because it does have some plus points not found in BrightEdge.
I had nothing to do with the choice or install. I assume it was made because it's easy to integrate with our SQL Server environment and free. I'm not sure of any other enterprise level solution that would solve this problem, but I would likely have approached it with traditional scripting. Comparably free, but my own familiarity with trad scripts would be my final deciding factor. Perhaps with some further training on SSIS I would have a different answer.
