Urgent: Campaign set up 'Select Competitors' errors

[RyanSMurphy]

Hi.

Im setting up my first campaign and Im having issues with step 3: 'Select your competitors to track'.

I only want to track 1 competitor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Murphy_(writer)

When I enter this and the competitor name into the form provided and click 'continue to next step'

it throws an error at me:

Darn, there are errors in your form! Don’t worry, Roger can’t feel pain.

• Competitors domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ryan_murphy_(writer) may not have a /path after the host
• Domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ryan_murphy_(writer) may not have a /path after the host

Can anyone help me as this is urgent.

[jennita]

Hi Ryan,

Unfortunately right now when you set up competitors you can only set it to a domain and not to a subfolder. The current URL you're trying to use for a competitor will cause errors because it's a subfolder of wikipedia.org. If you have any additional questions, feel free to email help@seomoz.org to contact the SEOmoz help team directly.

Jen

[ShaMenz]

Hi Ryan,

The problem I believe is that you are trying to track the specific page, rather than the entire domain (Of course I understand why in this case), but the feature is configured to track the domain and will therefore not accept a URL that includes the path following the trailing slash. Basically, it wants you to just enter http://en.wikipedia.org

I am not sure if SEOmoz staff will have any suggestion on solving this issue for your campaign, but you should email help [at] seomoz.org explaining your problem. Since it is a holiday weekend, you may need to wait a little while for a response, but I know that SEOmoz staff constantly surprise people by responding to enquiries when we don't expect them too, so give it a go. A direct email will definitely be the quickest way to let them know you have a problem.

In any case, while you cannot pull the information into your campaign, you can still obtain it using the  Open Site Explorer tool. I ran your Comparison URL in Open Site Explorer , but there is insufficient data for this particular page so you will only see the domain information at present. You can find all of the information that is returned in a campaign using this tool. To compare with your own site, just click the "compare sites" link below the OSE search URL input, enter your own URL and then run the search.

You can also download the comparison report from OSE and run advanced reports if you wish to do so. Export to CSV and you will be able to utilize the information in Excel, or generate a PDF.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[ShaMenz]

Hey Jen,

Its so good to see you back!