Moz Analytics set up: should I use www or not when I do website set up?

[dstepans]

Hello,

When doing website set up will www.mysite.com yield different results than just mysite.com ? Same about competitors: should I use www or not when I set up their sites? Or it won't matter?

Thanks,
Denis

[joseph.chambers]

You should use what you have set in google webmaster tools and whats indexed in google.

• site: domain.com
• site: www.domin.com

Good luck!

[LesleyPaone]

The question is a little bit deeper than you think. Using www. before your domain name is considered a sub domain name, the same as blog.domain.com  or store.domain.com. When you design the site or start doing SEO on the site you should decide which way you would like your site accessed. You only want your site to be accessed from either www.site.com or site.com, not both. Which ever you chose, you should redirect the other address to it. I hope that all made sense.

[GregB123]

When setting up Moz Analytics you should target it for whichever version of your domain you use.

If all your pages redirect to the www version, and all the search results featuring your pages have the www in front, then that is what you should set up Moz for.

This is not real easy as the set up screens seem to assume that you want to put in the plain non-www version. So you do have to enter the www version in the "What site do you want to track?" box on the first page of the set up screens.

When you get to the Competitor section, look and see if your competitors search results show up with www or store or blog or anything in front of their domain name and enter them the same way. That way you can compare apples to apples.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Denis,

Both Joseph and Lesley make good points, but I wanted to jump in specifically in regard to our tool.

It really depends on how your site is set up, but creating the campaign for the full root domain mysite.com would mean that we crawl and track every page of the site (up to your crawl limit) include any subdomains you may have. If you create the campaign for the www.mysite.com subdomain, we will only crawl and track pages on the site that include the www prefix. This means if you are ranking for a keyword with the page mysite.com/awesomerelevantpage, we would not include that as a ranking for the www.mysite.com subdomain campaign. Also, if www.mysitecom redirects to mysite.com, we wouldn't follow the redirect so you would only get one page crawled.

My advice when creating a campaign in our tools is to set up the campaign for the full root domain so you get a full picture of your site, unless you only want to track a specific subset of the site separately from the rest of the site.

I hope this helps!

Chiaryn
Help Team Ninja

[GregB123]

Hello Chiaryn,

From what I see on my campaigns, what you are saying is only true if a site is all redirected to the root domain version, or if both the root and the www version are active.

If a site is redirected to the www version, a campaign that uses the root domain will show faulty data. Please see the images from my Campaigns for my site (which is redirected to the www version) that I have attached for proof.

The old Moz Pro campaign (shown on the left) is set up for the www version of the domain. The Moz Analytics campaign (shown on the right) was set up for the root domain. The data on the right is much more accurate for Page Authority, LRDs, Total External Links, and HTTP Status. The other odd result is that few of the Top Pages match from www-campaign to root-campaign.

Please let us know if I am interpreting these things wrongs, or if I have the campaigns set up incorrectly...

www-vs-root.jpg

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Gregory,

Thanks for following up. The site isn't showing faulty data, just different data since the www and non-www versions of the homepage are considered as different pages, which would have different PAs and a different number of links.

Even if your non-www pages redirect to the www versions, other sites may be linking to the non-www versions, which would change which pages are considered to have the highest PA depending on which version of the campaign you are looking at. The non-www versions of the pages still legitimately have links going to them and would be taken into account when we are calculating PA and DA. The non-www campaign is actually giving you a fuller picture of the site.

I hope this clears things up.

Chiaryn

[HST-Marketing]

Hi Chlaryn,

Is it possible to change a current campaign from sub domain to root domain? Or will I have to create a new campaign from scratch?

Thanks!