Why did my Local Rank Tracker report fail to complete?

Very occasionally, Ranking reports fail to complete. You will know if a report has failed, as we will return an error message.

Automatic re-running of reports

We have an automated re-run system, which will attempt to re-run any failed reports every 15 minutes for a maximum of three attempts in total. If a report has not completed successfully after the third attempt, we won’t try again.

Reports can be manually re-run from within your account, using the following process:

1) Click 'Rankings' in the Location Sidebar menu
2) Click the 'Actions' dropdown
3) Click 'Re-run Report'
 

Why do Local Rank Tracker reports sometimes fail to complete?

There are a few reasons why this might happen:

a) Bing doesn’t recognize the Search Location

This is the most common reason for the failure of Local Rank Tracker reports. When we try to set the search location in Bing, it is sometimes not recognized. Bing’s search location feature is not as robust and reliable as Google’s, and we, therefore, see a much higher fail rate on Bing than on Google.

We attempt to set the search location up to 10 times, but if Bing fails to recognize it after the 10th attempt, the report is returned as 'failed'.

If your report has failed for this reason you have three options:

1) Run it again manually using the procedure outlined above — it's possible that Bing might work next time around
2) Change the search location and then re-run the report
3) Turn off Bing searches in your report settings and then re-run the report (to access report settings, click 'Edit Report' in the 'Actions dropdown)

b) Search engine blocks keyword searches

The search engines don’t like automated services (e.g. all rank tracker tools) querying them to get data. If they suspect that search queries are automated, they block the query from completing. We use thousands of proxy IPs to distribute our queries to the search engines to avoid detection.

However, sometimes they detect us and will block our queries, which results in a report failing.

c) Processing error

Sometimes the issue is at our end, as we process reports at an extremely high volume — this means that, very occasionally, our own systems / servers return errors.

We use a number of monitoring systems to detect such issues, and provide an early warning of potential issues. Our team of dedicated, hard-working developers and system administrators will then prioritize these issues, and resolve them as soon as possible.