Central Perk: Moz Analytics: A Quick Review

joi, 24 octombrie 2013

Moz Analytics: A Quick Review

Posted: 23 Oct 2013 07:16 AM PDT

At the end of May, Moz Analytics beta was rolled out to a gradually increasing number of Moz accounts. Its freshly designed package aimed to "give every marketer affordable software to measure and improve their efforts."

Moz Analytics may not be a full-service, top of the range analytics package, but it doesn't pretend to be either. Building on the PRO platform functionality, Moz Analytics now benefits from improved social analytics (including Google Plus) and brand mention tracking. Essentially, it has brought together all our favourite tools and more, into one convenient place.

The UI and navigation is a big leap forward and you can easily guess where the information you need can be found. In my opinion, dashboard is a little busy and I'd rather see strictly top level metrics for traffic, search, links, social and brand mentions on my dashboard and then click through to see more detailed data, but I've heard many positive comments about the dashboard so I may be in the minority there.

Since most of us already have a Moz account or at least use their tools, Moz Analytics is definitely worth exploring. I've been playing about with the new version for a few months now and have highlighted my favourite useful features of the product:

5 Great Moz Analytics Features

The data visualisations are great. Moz Analytics gives you some brilliant weekly and more long-term headline stats that provide a tangible overview of site performance. The time-frames on these charts may be confusing, but their value lies in their clear self-explanatory style. My favourite is the one below, which charts keyword ranking performance and its relationship with organic search volume. Our new name may be White.net, but we still love colourful graphics!

The Moz link metrics are great for benchmarking and checking performance alongside competitors. This is 'at a glance' stuff and it works well, bringing in OSE and Mozscape data. This section could do with a tidy up but the data is really useful for analysing linking issues and figuring out why you're ranking where you are.

Keyword Opportunities – this highlights any keywords that bring traffic to your site that you aren't tracking in Moz. It's not as useful since the (not provided) crash of September 2013, but still very helpful at pointing out the things you've missed with the keyword data that remains.

Basic SERP report (below) – this allows you to analyse your ranking position for each term you track and those ranking around you. It may give you some clues as to why you're ranking where you are and how you match up to your competitors.

Bounce rate on keywords visits – here you can see where your on-site content is lacking or where you're targeting the wrong terms. If something stands out here, it's worth looking into. A great metric, although it too is now not as useful due to the prevalence of (not provided)

What can it do for an agency like White.net?

Well, we don't expect to be using Moz Analytics every day and for every client, but some of its metrics are really great and with the future possibility of custom reports and exports to PDF, I will certainly be showing some of its useful data visualisations to clients.

Things I'd Like To See

Ability to choose different time frames – at the moment, there only one or two options available for each metric

Improved referral traffic and link discovery visualisations

Exporting to PDF and custom reports (scheduled for mid-November according to Matthew Brown's Moz post last week)

Look out for:

In the near future, they’ll be releasing features that give you the ability to estimate keyword traffic based on page-level performance, in order to replace some of the data that Google has removed.

If you've never looked into your website or analysed where your traffic is coming from, Moz Analytics is a good place to look for opportunities and insights.

For a guide to using the new Moz Analytics, check out this video walkthrough.

You can now take a 30 day free trial, so it's worth signing up to check it out.

Have you been using the new Moz Analytics? Which are your most used features and what tasks do you use it for? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below or via twitter @alex_cestrian.

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