Mastering Search Analytics

Chapter 15. Building Your Own Audit Tools and Enabling Others

The world of search analytics is still evolving today. There is no one simple tool to perform all search audits.

In large organizations, you may need to enable others to perform quick pulls of data. Some of these data pulls may be complete time wasters, such as requests for how many words rank in a number 1 position. These data points, while great with other data, don’t tell you a great deal on their own. In a well-defined space, you would ensure that everyone is educated as to what metrics are good definitions of success. If you define this as position ranking, expect to get lots of requests for position rankings; if it’s ROI by keyword, expect lots of requests for this type of report.

Many of the tools in the search world provide APIs that allow you to mix and match data points and derive some very powerful insights. Further, there are many questions that cannot be answered by pulling from only one data point, but can be established by combining multiple reports. If you have the time to pull from each source, that’s excellent; however, if your time is limited, I highly recommend that you get someone from your IT team to help build the tools you or others need to enable quick access to data that is not consolidated in one place.

Rubrics—How to Make Them

A very simple reporting tool you can use is a rubric. It provides a simple way of assessing issues, and grading them. This is a simple report card format that you can use ...