Review: Enquisite Pro, search analytics

I’ve been using Enquisite for about a year now and really liking it. It’s an analytics service that you can add to your website that tracks in great detail how you’re doing as far as the myriad search engines are concerned. Now, post electropacolypse, I just logged back in after a few weeks of not checking and see that they’ve released a brand spankin’ new interface with a lot of changes. The short answer is that what was already a really interesting tool has immeasurably improved it’s utility with a full facelift and a lot more great functionality.

First of all, Enquisite is not a replacement for a general purpose analytics service like Google Analytics (or Omniture, CoreMetrics, or what have you), it is a supplement to it. It’s a tool that just pulls every last interesting bit of information out of the the referrals that search engines send your way - much more in depth than what GA provides. So the set of information it uses is those first page views of visitors who come from a search engine - that’s the universe it uses.

From that it pulls your standard information like phrases, which search engine, which landing page and regional information. It also provides information on PPC campaigns, but since I don’t do any SEM I haven’t explored that at all. So just like its old interface it provides top line summary information about aggregate numbers for the past year, quarter, month, week and day - but it seems to have updated it to provide with running dates instead of calendar ones (i.e. past 7 days, past 30 days, etc…). Even better for graphing purposes it provides a Google Analytics style range slider that allows you to view any period you want just by opening and closing a range bracket. This is really useful to get an idea of how your site is pulling in the traffic. Here’s a screen cap of my site - I’m pretty happy about this here graph - it coincides nicely with yesterday’s inference of how my SEO is doing from Google Analytic’s Benchmarks.

Adding onto their previous functionality of simply listing the numbers and percentages from the various information (search phrases, engines, landing pages, region, etc..) they now allow you to group them so you can view aggregate information - so if I want to group all the various phrases that have review in them I can and see how I do with reviews. Or if I want to group the various regional Google search engines into one big Google, that’s easy, too. Even better for the graphing of these instead of only showing you percentages you now have the option of seeing percents or absolute numbers - which was a big gripe of mine before.

So, they’ve enhanced a lot of the old functionality they had and spruced up the interface with a fancy flash interface. But they’ve added a few brand new bits that are really interesting. What could prove to be really useful for many is their “Long Tail” tab. Here they provide you a graph divided into quarters of all your referring search phrases so you can see what’s in your fat head and your long tail. It’s remarkable for my site how thin my head is - and it can provide you with some insight into moving more of that 25-75% further up the charts. This would be especially useful if you’re doing any SEM since those 50-75% phrases are prime candidates for that type of thing. Now this may be my own ignorance talking here, but one thing I’d love to see added would be to be able to change that graph to show not just keywords but to be able to switch to landing pages or even search engines. I think that’d be worthwhile information to be able to see.

They also added a “search engine comparison” tab where you can choose up to three search engines and it will show you the top bits of information for each of them. For example, by default it shows you search phrases - so you get a listing of the top phrases for each one - clicking on any phrase will show you if the two other search engine’s have that in the listing and where it shows up. So it becomes very easy to see the differences in how the engines perceive your content. Beyond phrases you get, more or less, the usual complement of data slicing (landing page, country, etc..). This can highlight where your weaknesses are and suggest possible things to work on.

Lastly they added a very convenient download tab where you can grab monthly logs of all your information. A nice bit o’ data portability there! And it’s nice and processed with all the bits for each log entry split out, like phrases, search engines, etc…

Overall this is an amazing update for the service. I think pretty much all my beefs, save one, were addressed with this one. I’m still rolling through this, but I’m quite impressed. The only thing it doesn’t do (and really, it probably isn’t fair to expect it of such a specific service like this) is to track pages per visit. That is, what would be incredibly valuable would be to qualify the traffic by how much they’re hanging around the site. So it would be great to be able to tell the difference between a search phrase that provides a lot of clicks but all of them are 1 hit wonders and a different phrase that has less clicks but provides visitors that explore more of the site. But that starts to delve into a much more generic analytics package and probably provides a bunch of headaches in terms of user interface.

I highly recommend you give Enquisite a shot. From their blog, they’re saying that elements of this may become for pay with only the first two tabs remaining free. The first two tabs pretty much encapsulate what was in the beta version with improved functionality so they’re really only going to move the new fancy functionality behind a pay wall. Even so, I’m sad to hear it, given that this blog’s a hobby, I doubt I’d pay for it. I don’t, of course, begrudge anyone needing to actually make money off their business. :) And clearly depending on pricing real web sites should be able to derive significant value from this tool and the parts remaining free can be quite valuable to anyone interested in SEO and SEM.

Mar 25th, 2008 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: analytics · seo