ClickTracks unveiled the latest entry into the Web analytics market last week with their new mid-range product, ClickTracks Optimizer. Bridging the price and feature gap between ClickTracks Analyzer and ClickTracks Professional, Optimizer has been designed for use by consultants and mid-range search engine marketers.

Optimizer is available for $1195 or $99/month which falls midway between the $495 (or $49/mo) Analyzer and the $2995 (or $179/mo) Professional versions. ClickTracks CEO John Marshall explained the need for the new product in a statement issued by the company. "The market-and our own users-have been asking us to create a mid-range product, a hybrid of the ease of implementation Analyzer offers, but with some of the more robust features of Pro and we think ClickTracks Optimizer will fill that need, perfectly. We're confident that our core audience-anybody who really cares about search engine marketing and optimization-will immediately benefit from the information and insights Optimizer is able to deliver."

A variety of new features are available in ClickTracks Optimizer including robot reporting, integrated e-mail tracking and multi-user licenses. The new robot reporting feature is likely to play well with the search marketing crowd. It's designed to track not only which pages of a site a search engine has visited, but also to determine how frequently the visitors occur and when the last visit was recorded. The software tracks robot visits from Google, Ask Jeeves/Teoma, Yahoo!, MSN, Looksmart and AltaVista.

The new integrated e-mail tracking will come in handy for marketers that use SubscriberMail or other ESPs to send e-mail campaigns. ClickTracks e-mail tracking will generate and export targeted mailing lists based on label criteria and will send that data to your e-mail marketing system. Additionally, users can track e-mail campaigns from point of entry to the site and follow their clickpath through to checkout.

As with past versions, ClickTracks Optimizer still features integrated campaign tracking for Overture and AdWords campaigns as well as the ability to enter custom data for tracking banner ads, second tier PPC campaigns and even print ads. It also features the visual navigation report that first made ClickTracks popular.

ClickTracks has won the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Award in Web Analytics for each of the past two years and is one of my personal favorite pieces of software. The interface is easy to use and the reporting options are perfect for tracking ROI on search marketing campaigns. Even more importantly, their customer service and tech support department (available online via AOLIM) is among the best I've ever dealt with.

For more information on ClickTracks Optimizer, visit http://www.clicktracks.com/products/optimizer.

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