by Andrew Lennon | Editor-in-Chief | The Daily Anchor
I just went to your website and copied something from your last blog post. Do you know what text I copied? Which image I just swiped? If I pasted it into an email and sent it to 50 friends, would you have wanted me to include a link back to your site? Get Tracer.
Tracer is a new web analytics tool by Tynt, Inc. of Calgary that lets you track what content is copied from your website, and it automatically includes a link back to your site when that copy is pasted elsewhere. Visibility + backlinks = a good thing. In short, when you log into Tracer you see a tag-cloud of the most copied words, a list of the most-copied pages, thumbnails of the copied images, as well as some high-level stats (how many pageviews, actions, image copies and text copies were made in a day, 7 days, 30 days, and all-time.)
I first heard about Tracer via a Twitter update by Guy Kawasaki (thanks, Guy), and signed up to be a part of the Tracer beta release. So far? I’m impressed. It’s like Copyscape on steroids with a web 2.0-bent and successful lasik eye surgery.
I just checked my Tracer stats… It’s only 5:46am and there have already 195 independent selection/copy actions on my site: 28% of my visitors this morning have selected or copied text or an image. 4,907 words. 2 images. That’s insane. My most copied content is my recent post on 85 Twitter Tools with 7 selections and 9 independent copies.
Tracer is still in beta, but the other day I spoke with Tynt CEO Derek Ball to get some sneak insights into where the company is headed and what new features we can expect in the coming months. I’m not going to spoil the surprise, but suffice to say that this is just the beginning. Alpha testing validated the hypothesis that users are copying text/images way more than anybody thought, Beta testing is providing valuable feedback that Tynt is using to expand functionality, and the forthcoming wide-release is going to blow your socks off.
I asked Derek if he had a parting message for Daily Anchor readers, and after going on and on about how media savvy you all must be for reading The Daily Anchor, he said, “You’ve invest a lot of blood sweat and tears in your content and it IS leaving your site and going elsewhere on the web, so when it does, make sure it does something beneficial for you.”
There’s no word yet on when Tracer will enter wide-release, but I’ll be sure to let you know when it does.
