Updated January 4, 2013
The results are in! 780 readers completed the survey, with just under half being SEOmoz customers. The top five data sources for our readers include Web Analytics, Conversion Data from Web Analytics, Keyword Rank Position, Web Index Link Data, and Site Crawl Data. For your viewing pleasure, here is the complete list of results:
2012 was a year of triumphs and setbacks for marketers seeking the data to best accomplish their goals. Big improvements and additions in products like Google Analytics, GWMT, Bing Webmaster Tools, Mixpanel, KISSMetrics, Raven, and yes, SEOmoz PRO, too (along with dozens of others), helped many of us improve our reporting, auditing, and optimization efforts. But with the good came the bad, and setbacks like Google’s expansion of keyword (not provided), the loss of referral data from iOS6, and kerfuffles over AdWords data appearing alongside rankings reared their heads, too.
When it comes to marketing data, I really like the concept behind Google’s own mission statement: organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Unfortunately, I think the search giant has been falling short on a lot of the aspects that relate to our world, and thus it’s up to third parties to pick up the slack. Moz is obviously part of that group, and we have plenty of self-interest there, but many other companies (and often Google and Bing themselves) are stepping in to help.
To help better understand the information that matters most to professionals in our field, we want to run a short survey focused specifically on data sources:
We hope that this takes less than two minutes to complete, and that by aggregating broad opinions on the importance of data sources, we can better illustrate what matters most to marketers. In the spirit of transparency, we plan to share the results here on the Moz blog (possibly in an update to this post) in the next week or two.
Please help us out by taking the survey and by sharing it with your fellow marketers (or any professional you know who relies on marketing data).
Thanks very much!
*For those who have asked about SEOmoz’s own plans regarding rankings vs. AdWords API data – we have removed AdWords search volume from our keyword difficulty tool (it was never part of the formula), and will be working on alternatives, possibly with the folks over at Bing. Like others in the field – Hubspot, Ginza, Conductor, Brightedge, Authority Labs, etc. – we plan to maintain rankings data in our software.
