There are a lot of tools out there for every affiliate who wants to track their sites’ performance, search engine rankings, and traffic for different keywords.
On one end of the spectrum, there are basic search engine optimization tools with pricing starting at $10 per month (RankWatch), $49 per month (AWR Cloud), or $99 per month (Moz and Raven Tools).
On the other side of the spectrum there’s GinzaMetrics, with prices starting at $1,000 per month, which surely doesn’t make it a tool for those on a budget. But it may be useful for larger affiliates running many sites at the same time. Here’s our review.
The Plans
There are three main plans at GinzaMetrics:
- Small – $1,000 per month; 2,500 keywords tracked, up to 10 sites, 2 tracked competitors per site, 9-5 phone and email support.
- Medium – $1,500 per month; 5,000 keywords tracked, up to 30 sites, 3 tracked competitors per site, 1 custom dashboard, dedicated account manager, live chat support.
- Large – $2,500 per month; 10,000 keywords tracked, 100 sites, 4 tracked competitors per site, 3 custom dashboards, 24/7 phone and email support, dedicated account manager, live chat support, custom onboarding.
Today, we’re testing the Small package.
Getting Started
Right after signing up and confirming the account, you’ll see a clear interface with one main button to get started and six main sections in the sidebar:
After clicking the button, you’ll be taken to the site setup area:
Providing the URL of one of your affiliate sites will take you to the Country settings, which gives you the option to optimize the tracking mechanism to focus on the biggest search engines in your target area.
The next step is about connecting your GinzaMetrics account to your traffic analysis system. There are some options, one of them being Google Analytics.
GinzaMetrics will take a look at your keywords there and enable you to import them into your new dashboard. Next, you can set your site’s direct competitors, which will help you keep an eye on what they’re doing.
After going though the setup process, your dashboard should look something like this:
All your sites are listed in the central area. You can click on any of them to view the reports and your current rankings. Although when getting started, GinzaMetrics will take 24-48 hours to import all your data, so this section is not available right away.
However, you can still manage your competitors, your keywords and keyword groups.
Right off the bat, there’s only one keyword group labeled “branded,” but you can create a number of additional ones to get a better grasp on your rankings’ distribution.
The module of keyword management itself is a quite developed one delivering a lot of options. For instance, the keyword uploading module features eight different data importing templates. GinzaMetrics has been designed to make sure that it can handle even the highest numbers of keywords in your campaigns.
Once GinzaMetrics gets back to you with the stats and some ranking data, you can begin optimizing your site. The main panel presents details such as: your tracked organic visits, top keywords, findability score, and your site’s average rank.
You also get some recommendations and a custom score value describing your site’s level of search engine optimization. Very useful stuff if you’re looking for a starting point.
In the end, GinzaMetrics is an interesting solution for those affiliates who are serious about their rankings and have more than a handful of sites in their portfolio. It is an overkill for beginners, though. Consider signing up only if your business is already at a fairly advanced stage.