The Reporter feature in WebPosition 4 provides a convenient way to track your web site's position information on multiple search engines for keywords of interest to you. By default, WebPosition 4 presents the information in a neatly formatted HTML Report, which provides several different views of the data:

• a summary of your web site's visibility (see WebPosition's KVI)

• information about Link Popularity

• current, previous, and ranking change data sorted by search engine or keyword

• a competitive analysis report to compare your positions to those of your competitors

• a trend report showing the change in your positioning data over time for each keyword

• the trend, visibility, and summary reports all provide trend graphs to make the information easy to read at a glance

For most web site managers, these reports provide all the information needed to determine if their web site's search engine visibility is meeting expectations. However, some managers want additional flexibility in their reports, or perhaps wish to view the data in a customized way. With the Professional version of WebPosition, there are actually two ways to customize your reporting environment. You can either create a customized report template for the HTML format, or you can export your data into a Microsoft Excel or Access. In this article, I will briefly discuss the export methods available in WebPosition 4.

The first way to export data is in its raw form. WebPosition allows you to export your data into a tab delimited text file, which can then be opened by your favorite spreadsheet program, like Microsoft Excel for example. You are probably already aware that Excel is a powerful program that allows you organize and sort data easily. It provides built in mathematical functions, as well as many different graphing styles for your data. With your raw data, you can create your own completely customized charts, views, and analysis! Creating a useful customized report does require some expertise using Excel and an investment of your time, however.

For those of you who do not wish to start from scratch to create a customized spreadsheet, WebPosition has another style of export. This export method is called WebPosition SmartReports, and is based on technology originally designed for WebTrends (the market leading web analytics software). With the SmartReport feature, WebPosition exports the data first into a Microsoft Access database. Access is a relational database program that is capable of storing even more data than the 65,000 row limit in Excel. It's a great way to store and manipulate large amounts of data when you've outgrown the capacity available in Excel.

WebPosition SmartReports retrieves the data from the Access database and uses it to create a specially formatted Excel spreadsheet. The data is presented in two ways: a normal table with easily sortable columns, and a Pivot Table. Pivot Tables are very useful for quickly accessing different views of the same information. They allow you to pose questions about your data and get them answered quickly. Here is a video demo from Microsoft's web site which gives a nice introduction to the concepts underlying Pivot Tables.

The image below (view enlarged image) is an example of how the normal raw data might appear in Excel after exporting it using the SmartReport feature. The data is contained within a simple table with custom controls as column headings that allow rapid sorting and filtering of the data:

By contrast, here is one of the many views you might set up using the Pivot Table in your SmartReport (view enlarged image). Note that the data is sorted first by search engine, then keyword, URL, position, and finally by date. This view allows you to quickly see how the position for a particular keyword has changed over a specific date range.

Using the power of Pivot Tables, you can easily drag and drop the parameters in the table to create other ways of looking at the data to suit your needs. For example, another view you might take is to sort first by keyword, then position, URL, search engine, and finally date (view enlarged image). This view allows you to quickly see how particular keywords rank for each engine over the date range.

Note, however, that expert users of Microsoft Access are by no means restricted to viewing the data in the form of a SmartReport. Once the SmartReport export is complete, the data is available in an Access database for you to work with. The full power of Access can be used to create customized user interfaces and reports, create special queries to answer specific questions, or perhaps join the data with information from other sources (such as web analytics). WebPosition does in fact offer the option to import WebTrends data into your SmartReport and join it with WebPosition data.

Conclusion

WebPosition 4 Professional edition provides you with two different ways to export your search engine positioning data into Microsoft Office applications. This flexibility empowers WebPosition users to manipulate data into many useful views that can be used to enhance their understanding of their web site's search engine visibility.

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