The world of SEO is sometimes a bit more frustrating due to the randomness of your results. Its a shame that market sam and manually typing in keywords is the only barometer for seeing how well you have done. If there were more scales, charts or methods it would be cool... like some form of methodology, you could look at and it say ah you have done 30 hours blog posting... you have earned one star 30 hours article bookmark profilingrumering you have earned two stars Sometimes I purchase outsourced products get the reports, and have to sort of pray that I am moving in the right direction. Not only that but what you do today does not show up for 30 or 90 days depending on when you get crawled or sorted so this stuff is major tricky.. what do you do as your barometer.. and the first dickhead to say "REVENUE" gets the smug asshole award.
Ok now that Ive posted that. I actually use Market Samurai as my main method of tracking results. It allows me to track the results for a specific keyword, and the url of my domain that is ranking.
I don't over-analyze my results, only need a quick overview of my rankings to know where I need to dedicate some of my attention to... I run MS Ranking module once a week to show me my uppers and downers...
I use the rank tracker module and keep myself maxed out at 1000 results. This allows me to focus on my main pages within my site and then work on other pages and see their progress moving up in the serps. Right now I have 22 pages of my site ranking, most are under the 300 mark and the main one I am focusing on is right around the 100 mark. I have been tracking the daily changes as well as the increase in rankings
I use market sam to track my rankings for keywords and backlinks, thats all I really need to know, it gives me a graph so I can see my progress over time and it seems to work very well for me, obviously if a keyword is dropping rapidly in the SERPS, then I'll need to do some work to improve it, but that's all the data I need for SEO reports.