Review: Enquisite

A commenter here directed my attention towards Enquisite a web based reporting service who’s hook is their focus on search referrals. With an obsessive granularity and focus on reporting on search engines and search phrases they provide you with a wealth of information that I haven’t seen in other reporting tools. My short review is this, if search engines form any respectable portion of your site (and maybe even if they don’t but you want them to) try and sign up for the beta, it’s definitely worth a look.

As a starting point of topline information, it provides you with summary information about the number of search referrals in various durations (today, yesterday, last week, last month) over various time periods (last month, last quarter, last year), etc.. This is relatively interesting information although available elsewhere (like in google analytics) but rarely in so convenient a form. I’ve been evaluating the process for just over a couple weeks so I don’t have that wealth of information, but I’d guess it would highlight very broad trends in your search traffic.

Fortunately that is just the very beginning. It’s granular information is in two graphs. The top graph let’s you choose the duration of the graph (all time, 1 year, 3 months, 30 days) and then it charts a variety of things. The most useful that I found were top search phrases, search engines, web pages and page #. Search phrases charts the 10 most common phrases over the time period, search engines shows you the search engines that referred you the most traffic, web pages the most referred pages on your site and very interestingly page # which tells you what page of the search engine results they got to your site from. They also give you geographic information. Also, when they say search engine, they are granular enough that they are showing you all the different Google’s - that is, they are breaking it down by country specific Google.

Across all those reports they tell you the lowest, highest, average and last page number (in the search results pages) for that element. So you know that people searching for Foo found your link on pages 1 - 4 with an average of the second page. That’s information I haven’t seen anywhere and is pretty good. With their page # report you can see that there is an order of magnitude fall off in links with each page in you get to.

In the bottom pane they give you much more flexibility in the time frame you select (day, week, month, year) and show you aggregate numbers for all the reports. They also very easily let you add search criteria over any of the pages they show you and give you a very fine grained report of almost any combination of pages, engines and phrases you want. This can surface some pretty interesting details about who and how people are approaching your content.

The service is really good, especially for a beta. What I wish it could report on was also the number of page views for each report. That helps to qualify how “good” the traffic is for whichever report you are looking at. Enquisite is focused on showing you the success of your pages and marketing efforts in bringing people to your site - that’s the first step. But if they could take it the second step so that you know how valuable those people are, that would be the cat’s meow. It’s something I find to be really important - google analytics shows you that information, but not nearly the other info Enquisite shows.

The site itself, is kind of ugly. But that’s just my opinion. A wierdness that they had to explain to me was that the top pane didn’t update with the same frequency as the bottom so there was generally a discrepancy between the numbers shown. They’re working on that, but it isn’t a big deal in the first place.

One last feature I’d love to see added would be to add some ability to group search phrases. When people searching for “foo bar” sometimes they type “bar foo” or “foo-bar” - ultimately they’re the same search, so it’d be super convenient to group them all together. Again, this would be a nice feature, but the service is more than fine without it.

It’s a great tool, I hope they can expand on the functionality a little bit, but even without that, it is definitely worth your time to check into it if you run a website. It will also drive home how much Google dominates the search space.

Mar 29th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: analytics · review · web app