Gone are the days
of creating a campaign and placing a 1-page ad in the most read magazines and a
30-second commercial on one of the most watched TV shows. With technology, a modern marketer can track
pretty much anything on the web.
Analytics platforms are commonly used and allow marketers and CEOs to
understand how to continuously optimize websites, content, and social outreach
(Hilhorst, 2014).
If we were
creating an Internet marketing campaign and two of our strategies were creating
an SEO strategy and perhaps a PPC campaign, then we would want to measure the
results through an analytics tool.
Getting Internet marketing right is tricky, and it’s nearly impossible
to get it all right the first time (Cummings, 2014). Search engines like Google are constantly
making changes to their algorithm, which means something that worked before,
may not work this time around. Tracking
your results will help you identify what is and what is not working, and helps
you improve and customize your marketing efforts to best fit your needs, and
the need of your target audience (Cummings, 2014).
This week, I needed
to identify another tool in the marketplace that wasn’t Google Analytics. First thing that came to my mind, thanks to
me following their blog, was Moz. If you
aren’t familiar with Moz, they are one of the Internet’s leading search engine
marketing companies, and offer a complete web analytics package (Sparks,
2014). Their analytics can help you
track your search marketing, social media marketing, brand activity, links, and
content marketing efforts all in one convenient location (Sparks, 2014). In 2008, Moz launched their own crawl (now
called Mozscape) so they could provide online marketers with insights they
can’t get anywhere else (Moz, n.d.).
Their most recent Mozscape Index has over 189 Billion URls (Moz, n.d.).
For comparison
purposes, we will look at the pro version of Moz Analytics. With their tools, you can measure and improve
your search, social, brand, and content marketing with Moz Analytics. Perform in-depth research on your site – and
your competitors – with their research tools (Moz, n.d.). Moz Pro subscriber’s benefits include
educational resources, answers to tough technical questions from their
community of professional marketers, and more.
·
All your data in one place - You can track the performance of all your
inbound marketing efforts on one platform, then shows you the relationships
between your content, SEO, social activity, brand mentions, and inbound links
(Moz, n.d.)
·
Beautiful visualizations of your data over
time - Moz Analytics
gives you a picture of how your efforts have performed over time. Watch the
trend lines of your growth and momentum, and highlight factors that have caused
shifts in performance (n.d.).
·
Competitive Analysis – Moz shows you all of your data in a
comparative view with your competitors.
Scope out their link profiles, traffic, social activity, mentions of
their brand online, trending content pieces, and more.
·
Actionable Insights for Your Next Steps – Moz Analytics gives you insights you can
act on – and data to help you prioritize your next move. Learn what keywords can optimize for to boost
traffic, discover missing meta-tags, delete duplicate page content, and
optimize your site for quick wins.
·
(Source:
Moz, n.d.).
Moz Pro’s and Con’s of Moz Analytics
The biggest pro
for Moz analytics is they offer some of the best tools on the market for link
management and analysis. You can really
get a lot of information about how to improve your SEO campaigns (Sparks,
2014).
The biggest con
for Moz analytics, they don’t actually measure your traffic. As a result, you would need to be familiar
with both Moz Analytics and Google Analytics in order to get data about your
traffic patterns (Sparks, 2014).
Google Analytics and Moz Analytics
While I haven’t
used Moz Analytics, I would like to offer what I see as the comparisons and
differences, between Moz and Google Analytics. Moz first started as an SEO tool, but has
transformed into an analytics tool, with a focus on empowering inbound
marketers. First, it’s important to note
that the Moz platform syncs with Google Analytics and pulls data on your site’s
inbound channels to provide different insights than what you might be
accustomed to from Google Analytics (Wallace, 2014). The biggest difference with Moz, is the
beautiful data visualization over time with custom reporting, competitive
insights to help with research, and actionable recommendations to improve your
performance (Wallace, 2014). With Moz
Analytics, it’s not an either Moz Analytics or Google Analytics, cause it
relies heavily on Google Analytics to do its job. While Google provides you with the data from
your marketing efforts, Moz takes that data and creates data visualization graphs,
along with insights that you can act on.
Under their On-Page Optimizations, they have an On-Page Grader tool that
evaluates any page on your website, or even your competitor’s, and assigns a
letter grade A-F. The grade is based on on-page optimizations related to a
specified keyword (Wallace, 2014).
According to
Wallace (2014), the report evaluates everything from title tags and keyword
usage to canonicals and semantic markup.
It even displays a target keyword for that page and the recent change in
rankings. This is no doubt a tool that
would come in very handy for the newer SEO pro and I would find this type of
information very informative.
As someone who is
very passionate about social media, Moz Analytics also offers you the ability
to sync your social accounts. This
allows you to not only monitor interactions such as retweets and shares, but
you can see traffic-driving retweets and shares (Wallace, 2014). This level of detail simply isn’t available
with Google Analytics.
In conclusion,
Moz seems to have a very powerful tool, but it doesn’t come free like Google
Analytics. Moz will run you anywhere
from $99/month, up to $599/month, a price that might not be available to
businesses with small budgets. I'm
definitely intrigued by Moz Analytics, but see GA as the better choice. With Google Analytics Academy and some
invested time, GA would be also be the more fiscally sound choice too.
Have you or do
you currently use Moz Analytics, or do you mainly stick with Google Analytics?
Is there another analytics tool that you find valuable?
References
Cummings, A. (2014). Top e-marketing metrics you should be monitoring [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://blog.ispionage.com/top-e-marketing-metrics-monitoring.html
Hilhorst, A. (2014, October 8). Data, design and analytics: Is this the future of marketing? [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.onalytica.com/blog/posts/data-design-and-analytics-is-this-the-future-of-marketing
Moz. (n.d.). Software for managing inbound marketing and local SEO. Retrieved from http://moz.com/products
Moz. (n.d.). Why choose Moz? We know marketing data. Retrieved from http://moz.com/products/why
Sparks, C. (2014, March 11). 10 Great social and web analytics tools. Retrieved from http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-great-social-web-analytics-tools/90629/
Wallace, S. (2014, June 12). Moz Analytics review: How it fits into your toolset [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.neboagency.com/blog/how-moz-analytics-fits-into-your-existing-toolset/
No comments:
Post a Comment