Brand and Mentions is being retired

[jon.white]

Hello!

I am the Moz Analytics product manager here at Moz, and I want to let you know about a change that is coming.

Brand and Mentions is being retired
On August 20, 2015, we are retiring the Brand and Mentions feature in Moz Analytics in order to focus our efforts on features core to search marketing. Don't worry though, you can still use Fresh Web Explorer to access the same data instead (more below).

Why?
When we first launched Moz Analytics in 2013, one of the goals of the application was to allow you to track the visibility of your brand and how it relates to your branded organic traffic and direct traffic. However, since then, a couple of things have changed:

• (not provided) for Google, and now Bing, have meant that it has become almost impossible for us to accurately estimate the amount of traffic that has come from branded organic keywords. We had to adjust product direction based on this.
• We have learned our Moz Analytics customers are still more passionate about our core SEO features (rankings, links, traffic and crawl) than they are about Brand & Mentions.

Unfortunately, it didn’t evolve as we intended
While other tools and features have seen significant iteration and improvement over time, Brand and Mentions has not. We no longer feel it is the quality we owe our customers, and recognize that Fresh Web Explorer offers better functionality. A retirement benefit, if you will, is that we will be able to focus time on innovating our other core SEO tools.

Fear not! Fresh Web Explorer gets you all the data you need!
If you are a regular user of Brand and Mentions, don’t worry – You can still get all of the data in Fresh Web Explorer; a searchable database of millions of recently published pages and articles, which is updated every 4 hours. To learn more, visit the Brand and Mentions page for any Moz Analytics campaign. Now there is only one place you need to go to find mentions data. We have also increased the number of Fresh Web Alerts you can setup from 10 to 35.

What Brand and Mentions users need to know

A small number of customers will be impacted in the following ways:

• If you have a custom report setup with Brand and Mentions data, this data will disappear from reports published after the feature is retired. You don’t need to do anything, this will happen automatically.
• Fresh Web Explorer allows you to see historical data for up to 30 days, whereas Moz Analytics showed saved query history longer. To see trended data for longer than 30 days you will need to export it periodically.

OK got it! What should I do now? If you were not using Brand and Mentions, then this change doesn’t affect you.  If you were a regular user, you’ll need to move your queries to Fresh Web Explorer before the shut-off date: Visit a campaign and use the link at the top of the Brand and Mentions Overview to learn how.

More questions?
Please feel free to post comments and feedback below. If you would like help migrating your data, use the Help button in the bottom right of your screen to chat to one of our Customer Success team members.

Thanks!

Jon

[scienceisrad]

I'm right in the middle of setting up some new campaigns and ongoing reports, so I want to make sure I don't invest time into setting things up that will go away.  So a couple clarifying questions:

Does this mean that "Opportunities" under the Links section will be going away, too?

We should not set anything new up under "Manage brand rules"?  Or will the "Manage brand rules" part stay to continue to allow the distinction between "branded keywords" and "non-branded keywords" under keyword rankings?

[David-Kley]

Sounds good to me. We are more focused on keyword rankings, traffic trends over time, etc than brand mentions. If you are branded correctly you will come up when a search is done for your name.

The one thing I would change is the amount of keywords per account. Each level of moz pro gives you a different amount of keywords and a certain amount of accounts. For our account, I would like to have more accounts as long as we fall under the keyword amount. For example we could have 20 accounts that share the same keyword amount. Most of our clients only care about 20-40 keywords, but we are limited by the amount of accounts we can have. Seems counter-productive to have it set up this way.

[jon.white]

Hello!

Thanks for the questions!

• Opportunities will be staying - that is very core to SEO and something we recently revamped!
• Please continue to use Brand Rules to distinct between branded and non-branded keywords - this is also staying!  We are also launching a visibility score soon which will be really useful to segment by branded/non-branded.

Let us know if you ever have any more questions!

Jon

[jon.white]

Thank you for the feedback! How many campaigns would you setup if they were unlimited? And how many do you have now?

[Travis_Bailey]

It was terrible to begin with. I understand that it was attempting to replace something similar to Google Alerts, but few use Regex. I can and do, but what the hell were people thinking?

[Cazbah]

Couple things.  Why not put something in the dashboard telling people what happened to the report?  I spent way too much time looking for it and had to do a forum search to find out what happened.

Also, I understand that the report is not accurate so just take out the traffic numbers but give us the Fresh Web Explorer right in the dashboard with a decent downloadable report.  The .csv report is not going to cut it when I am trying to build reports for my customers.

In the end you have taken value out of the Pro product and moved us to the free Fresh Web Explorer tool.  That doesn't make me feel real good about the value of my monthly subscription.