In the late spring, we expanded our mission and made the switch to Moz to provide marketers with competitive analytics and resources to measure and improve their efforts. In addition to our name change and shiny new website, we started a private beta of Moz Analytics, our new platform to provide online marketers with all their inbound marketing data in one place:
Moz Analytics gives you a deeper look at keyword rankings and more competitive tracking features
In a hurry? Check out the tl;dr at the end of the post.
Moz Analytics is now live!
We were taken a bit by surprise when we received over 80,000 signups for the invite list over the summer. Today, we are pleased to announce we've sent out all those invites, given access to all our PRO customers, and have now released Moz Analytics to the public. If you haven't already tried it out, you can take a 30-day free trial right here.
Our engineering team spent long hours this summer making sure our PRO users' data was transitioned as smoothly as possible and that new users would have a great experience with their workflow when they signed up. They also made a great deal of changes based on beta tester feedback, as well as added many new upcoming features to our roadmap. Rand laid out the vision of Moz Analytics in his post about our switch to Moz: Our goal is to give every marketer affordable software to measure and improve their efforts.
Of course, there are numerous other ways to communicate with us about Moz Analytics. Our Help Team is working with our engineers to address issues and answer your initial questions, so please don't hesitate to reach out to them. And our Community folks are available on Twitter @Moz if you'd like to give us a quick shout.
Before I dive in, I need to stop and give a shout out to the amazing work performed by the engineers, designers, data scientists, testers, product and project managers, marketers, and Help Team folks that made Moz Analytics possible. Today's launch is the result of over two years of massive effort from these Mozzers, and it's an honor for me to write this post introducing what they've built.
Visitor metrics: powered by Google Analytics
Moz Analytics makes use of Google Analytics as the backbone of our visitor analytics and search data, which we combine with our competitive link data, brand and mentions data, and social metrics to offer you useful data points like branded search vs. non-branded, the ability to track keywords over time, and the ability to assess your competitors' progress.
Connecting your Moz Analytics account to Google Analytics isn't a requirement. You can still use all the functionality in our competitive research tools like Open Site Explorer, Followerwonk, Rank Tracker and Keyword Difficulty, as well as access to our Community Q&A and Moz Academy.
However, connecting Google Analytics will provide you with the best Moz Analytics experience, which is key to identifying opportunities to drive visibility and find new audiences.
All your marketing analytics in one place
We've taken the core PRO functionality, added new brand and mentions tracking, enhanced data visualizations, and upgraded social analytics and competitor tracking. When we launched SEOmoz PRO in 2010, our goal was to consolidate our tools into a platform to enable marketers to simplify their workflow. With Moz Analytics, we're taking that one big step further and creating a platform that can be used to efficiently track all of your key marketing metrics and identify which channels have new opportunities for your site or company.
Getting started: the campaign dashboard
One of our main goals was creating better dashboards across the entire product. PRO users have given us lots of feedback about being able to quickly identify successes as well as potential problem areas. Our main campaign dashboard was the result of this feedback:
The Moz Analytics campaign dashboard aggregates metrics from all your channels
Our Help Team has made a fantastic walkthrough video of what you'll see on your campaign dashboard.
Once you've got a feel for your data in the dashboard, you can start exploring the different channels measured by Moz Analytics. We built upon the four main elements of the SEOmoz PRO search features: traffic from search, keyword rankings, on-page performance, and crawl diagnostics.
Start by checking to see how much traffic your site is receiving, in both branded and non-branded search traffic. As we move toward a world of (not provided), this will be a key metric to track in order to assess search performance. In the near future, we'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.
Moz Analytics tracks four major categories of marketing channels:
Search: enhanced SEO performance tracking
Search traffic data powered by Google Analytics combined with Moz Analytics brand tracking
We kept almost all of the functionality of SEOmoz PRO, but increased granularity in the metrics. We've made the workflow easier to manage within the search channel, added a deeper view of the performance of visits that arrive from tracked keywords, provided a data view to identify and quickly add keywords to your campaign tracking, and recreated the search dashboard to provide an easy overview of your SEO performance.
Coming soon: A brand new redesign of custom reports, and redesigned PDF exports. Our users have let us know that custom reports and exports are key to their PRO workflow, so they're getting a ground-up redesign and will be deployed in the next release (slated for mid-November).
Social: new data and better reporting
We've added Google+ fans and interaction tracking, an enhanced dashboard, an enhanced filtered view of your most engaging posts, more data from Facebook and Twitter, and an increased ability to track social behavior by source. You can also sort social performance by daily and weekly time frames.
Aggregated metrics for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, as well as analysis of your interactions
Links: new features for competitor tracking
There's now a new high-level view of link changes that ties to the traffic you're receiving from each link, as well as enhanced views that let you spot mentions that aren't yet linking to you. We've also included domain authority metrics from Mozscape, which will allow to track your progress against your competitors.
Link tracking now lets you measure over time and drill down into your link profiles
Brand and Mentions: quickly spot your opportunities
Editor's note: In August 2015, we retired the Brand and Mentions section in order to streamline Moz Analytics and focus our efforts on features that are core to search marketing. Learn more about the change.
Keep tabs on your brand mentions and branded links, and track against your competitors. Find mentions that are specific to your industry. This new section of Moz Analytics lets you easily spot which pages are receiving branded traffic and what percentage of your traffic is driven by brand strength across your channels.
Brand and mentions tracking are key to finding competitive opportunities across your channels
Setting up brand tracking
One of the big feature additions to the new software is the ability to track brand and mentions data within the application (our standalone research tool to do this is Fresh Web Explorer).
To measure branded traffic, you need to set up queries in the application. We recommend doing this as soon as you get started with Moz Analytics, so that the software can begin capturing this data.
We put together a video that walks through this setup, and also shows examples of both basic and advanced queries that are available within Brand and Mentions.
What if I want to switch back to PRO?
Nothing is more important than the integrity of our users' workflow. It doesn't matter how nifty we think Moz Analytics is; if your time is negatively affected by the new platform, we're not happy.
To that end, we made sure that users continue to have access to PRO while we transition to Moz Analytics. It's easy to make the switch back to PRO. There's a link right next to the Campaign drop-down at the top left:
PRO users may sometimes wish to switch back to the new version of their campaigns to access custom reports and PDF exports. We anticipate having brand new versions of this reporting in November. We'll be sunsetting the PRO platform in the future, but users will receive plenty of heads-up before that happens.
What's next?
First up? Making sure Moz Analytics contains all the features and functionality that has made our PRO software useful to online marketers. We'll be making many feature additions and revisions throughout the rest of the year.
This post was designed to give you an outline of the features and functionality of Moz Analytics, and what we're planning in the near future. From here, we'll regularly post feature breakdowns that go into more detail on each section of the software, and how we're using it across each of these marketing channels.
Going forward, we also plan on cutting down the wait time significantly between releases. Our last major release was 2010, and we want to add value to our platform quite a bit more frequently than that. We'll be launching custom reports and PDF exports, content analytics, more Fresh Web Explorer integration, additional social media tracking data, enhancements to rank tracking, more comprehensive Freshscape indexes, and a few other surprises before the end of this year. Our goal is to continue to release new things that make being a Moz Analytics subscriber a great return on your marketing spend.
We hope you enjoy your first experience with Moz Analytics, and please let us know what you think. Ready to get started? Our Help Hub has got you covered.
Is there a tl;dr?
Sure! The 'just the facts' version of this post goes something like this:
- Moz Analytics is now available to the public. Not signed up yet? Take a free 30-day trial.
- Moz Analytics provides vastly improved data visualization and enhanced competitive metrics vs. our PRO software
- We've designed Moz Analytics to allow our users to manage their competitive analytics in one place, and to highlight opportunities across a wide array of online marketing channels.
- Our visits and search traffic data is powered by Google Analytics. Connecting your Moz Analytics account to GA will provide the most robust data we have to offer.
- All current PRO campaigns will still be accessible for at least the next few weeks. All new campaigns will be created in Moz Analytics.
- Not ready to make the switch yet? You can continue to use PRO with the click of a link.
- Our Communications Team has created a plethora of great documentation to introduce new features and get you started.
Are we going to get monthly time frames for everything, weekly is a lot less important for me!
Ditto. Well, we'd like the ability for both really, set time frames as needed.
This is in the works, but won't be available until a little later this year. I'll add an update when we are clearer on the timing for this.
Yes! Monthly timeframes and custom reports are being worked on now, with a hopeful launch in 3-6 weeks.
I've been using Moz Analytics since MozCon this year. It has led me to start doing weekly reports that include a handful of screenshots from the tool. I'm highly anticipating the monthly view update and can see myself using these reports more and more when showing directors visual reports to answer their "how are things going?"
Now that we've lost keyword data and are moving towards organic traffic to individual pages, I'm confident that Moz Analytics will be one of the most promising solutions on creating a large bulk of the work in creating these new reports and dashboard. It's obvious that Moz knows what they are doing and after seeing how Rand addressed the issues at hand and what the solutions are on WBF a few weeks ago. I felt like that WBF was foreshadowing of what Moz Analytics would become.
One thing that I haven't submitted in yet but will do so shortly is tying Goal Competitions across the major channels and importing conversion rates. Sure, GA can do it but incorporating those reports could make our lives a bit easier. Nothing super granular but overall goal competitions via Organic, Direct, Referral, etc..
Been using your trial for a little over two weeks now. The data is still rolling in. One important note is that it's quite hard to find truly actionable items. I can find some under Optimization, Diagnostics and Opportunities. But it's not like your dashboard says: do this next. LinkedIn does a great job at this. You might want to look into this to make the interface more actionable. You could even hook it up with some of the great tutorials here and generate some more traffic.
More feedback as I go along.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree completely and really like the idea of an actions/opportunity dashboard that surfaces items from across the different reports. We'll give this one some thought.
Yes, I agree - this is important, especially for newbs
Can you compare current time frame to past time frame, just as last month and last year?
That's a feature we're definitely planning to build. As more folks are on the platform longer, the data becomes more useful historically (especially for seasonality trends year over year). I'd expect comparison timeframes sometime in Q1 2014.
Great request. We don't support this yet, but I'll make sure it is on our backlog to consider for future releases.
Matthew,
I have yet to "play" with Moz Analytics, but it's something I'm eagerly anticipating, if only because I loved Pro and cannot wait to see the improvements.
I loved/love Pro, but under-appreciated aspects of the service are the nuanced, sharp, printable reports and the exceptional customer service.
RS
Thanks Ronell. Improving upon the PRO reporting and making that part of Moz Analytics is our first priority. A lot of our customers, both in-house and on the agency side, rely on them to provide intel.
Good stuff guys! Congrats on the launch, this has been a long time coming, loved it in the beta and will love it in live use!
Looking forward to the not provided data that was mentioned coming in the next year! All the integration with the businesses Moz has acquired over the years will be huge for this. I'd love to see more integration with GetListed's local tools natively within Mozlytics but regardless, this is killer!
I REALLY like dashboard! Seems to provide much more insight into the "SEO" world and side of things then what Google Analytics provides. Thanks for this information, Matt!
Good question, Scott. We currently show local pack results for serps whose terms are explicitly location specific (such as 'London pizza') for the search engine + country combinations that you have selected. We do not yet allow you to specify city or locale for which you wish to see local results (for example, you can't yet choose Google.co.uk as your search engine and London as your locale to automatically get London-locale-specific results for the term 'pizza').
The latter is something we have certainly discussed, but I don't have a timeframe for such an update. It certainly is something I foresee us adding.
A wonderful, awesome tool indeed. Thanx for the guide, it was enlightening
... and "not provided" from google... damn...
Our data science team is working on a predictive algorithm to help recover some of that data :-) Goal is to have an early version by the end of the year!
I got an answer: do ctr vs position and we'll know. That's my idea and I need many websites to do that task:) at least 100 with big traffic.
There's no data when checking where user come from? Is "keyword" information blocked or coded?
Glad to hear solution coming for 'not provided'. Its the need of hour.
That will be awesome. Look forward to seeing it.
Is it not possible to swipe the data from our web master tools accounts and have this data show up in the reporting rather than GA data for keywords. Or is the web master tools API a lot more locked down?
.....he asks knowing about as much about data science as the average 5 year old!
Been using the program since the early release and I really like the interface. The graphic representations are easy to read and let you spot a problem right away. I will like it much more when the comparison add ons that are talked about above get added.
I signed up a week ago and I'm still seeing "We're collecting your data/check back in 24 hours" for certain parts. I created a brand keyword and it's not showing up. I hooked up my Analytics but I'm not seeing any traffic being pulled in.
I was also unable to add my Facebook *Page" into the analytics. There was only an option to add my personal page.
I was really looking forward to this but it's just not living up to what I thought it would be, unfortunately...
Hi Suzany,
So sorry to read about your troubles. Have you contacted our help team at https://moz.com/help/contact? We'll be able to help you get things working that way.
All keyword date will be gone soon so that's a big part of the system gone too? Do you have some sort of solution to this, probably not if you're pulling data from GA.
Hi Marty - thanks for the comment - we are working on a way to get the same, or similar data after Google goes to 100% (not provided). This is an important problem for our customers, and us! Stay tuned for an update soon.
Good question. We're digging into some ideas now about estimating this traffic and supporting other approaches to search optimization that are less reliant on this data. More on this soon.
Great to hear guys - keep up the good work.
I can't wait to see your solution to this problem, it'll be a blessing to many I am sure.
Hi Matthew Brown,
I read your post that is completely informative that give the knowledge about Moz Analytics. Its true that really its new platform to offer internet marketers with all their inbound marketing data in one place.
So, I am very thankful from your news.
This is a great product that visualizes Data in a way that helps me understand it. Much better than exporting and trying to make it look pretty in another program. I do wish the "Go Back To Pro" button was a little more prominent on the page. Thanks for the Trial
I like the feature of ability to track social behavior the most. It reduces work and gives insightful data to internet marketers.
Is there any plans to enhance the ranking reports for localized data instead of just U.S.? I just saw that myseotool does that but I really dont want to spend many on many platforms, especially if the Moz team has an expected feature list!
Seem a lot of people over in the Q&A lost on your analytics glad that they can now read this and hopefully feel less lost.
Looking forward to doing reports again and some of the other features coming.
Thanks.
Were using your trial. Have not got to grips yet. in the first few days it crawled and we had to wait. Then it came back with some stats, checking back a few days later to go over this with our developer, everything is back to zero and all features say "were collecting your data check back" its been like this for a long time now. Could someone take a look at the problem. Not that impressed so far especialy as our trial has been eaten up.
Oh no! Really sorry to hear about this. If you contact our help team at https://moz.com/help/contact, we can look into what's going on and get it all fixed up for you.
Hi there!
Thanks for reaching out to us. I am sorry to hear about your experience with our tool. It does look like your account is exhibiting the issue you mentioned. Can I trouble you to send us a request at here and go into your issue a bit more since it would be better for us to better resolve your issue there :)
Thanks for your time, I Hope to hear from you soon!
Best,
Peter
Moz Help Team.
Was wondering which one is better, Google or Moz Analytics.. Now that keyword data is not provided in Google Analytics, this is something we could think of for better reporting.
in piwik not provided is too...
The Not Provided keyword data is a result of Google not sending information to ANY analytics provider, it's not just that Google Analytics is refusing to show the data. No matter what analytics program you use, you'll still see Not Provided.
Making Your own will do something or in logs there's "just link from google without or coded keyword"?
I could fix it but it takes time.
I read many blogs and tried to fix it up, but the end result favored Google only. Not able to retrieve those keywords.
I really want to like and use Moz Analytics, however it seems to be experiencing some problems so far. My dashboard won't hook up/report Google Analytics data at all, the reporting options seem very limited so far, I have had to hook and unhook social media platforms numerous times to get data to populate and I don't seem to be getting a lot of feedback from support.
Do you have any insight as to when these issues might be hammered out?
Thanks!
Really sorry about these issues, Noah! Now that Analytics is being used by a larger audience, we're seeing some bugs that can be pretty difficult to resolve quickly. The Help Team is communicating these bugs to our engineering team and trying our best to communicate ETAs on fixes when we have them. It's hard to see how long some of these bugs will take to fix, though. If you have an email conversation going with us, we will do our best to update that conversation weekly to get you the latest information. Thank you!
Moz Analytics looks extremely valuable. Wish I could get on the list to try it, but currently not under a subscription. Gotta talk with the people above! :)
Hi Brady, thanks for the kind words! You're more than welcome to take a 30-day free trial of the software -- no list required. =)
Looks sexy. Can't wait to try it.