RavenTools Reviews

Adding Instagram reporting.

Their ranking functionality could be a bit better.

Their site optimization can be a bit confusing as well and can lower their score of your site.

I really wish RavenTools provided additional reporting for other social media platforms, particularly right now... Instagram

If RavenTools could track and report on hashtag engagement across the social media platforms they already integrate with, that would also be a huge benefit.

Would be great if RavenTools could provide comparison data for reporting based on similar industry types or verticals

The analytics in the tool and the Google Analytics dashboard have been known to be out of sync, but this doesn't happen very often.

The reports occasionally have glitches, such as overlap of different modules.

The keyword tracking tool does not provide easy tracking of rankings over time.

Downtime: There have been instances when I have needed time-sensitive reports and have discovered parts of the system are down. If you are using this software with multiple clients on a daily basis, you may run into some issues. I have experienced everything from reports failing to be updated in real time to not being able to reach the website.

Limited Platform Integration: While RavenTools does offer a decent amount of data, they seem to be slow to add some platforms. For example, you can't connect your Instagram account and on their website they explicitly say "No plans to develop an integration anytime soon." - which is very unfortunate.

Dashboard Organization: I guess this could be considered Personal Perfernce, but I think some tools could be better organized on the dashboard. After using RavenTools for 3 years, I still have to search around for certain tools. Let's say I want to do some keyword tracking. I can go to the "Campaign" tab and insert multiple keywords. A week later I want to research those same keywords. If I go under the "Research" tab, none of my keywords are there. I have to go back to the "Campaign" tab, click research, and then I am redirected to the "Research" tab where the information populates. You would think that the information would automatically remain under the "Research" tab, but nope. I would have to go through the "Campaign" tab and repeat the process again just to revisit the keyword information.

Communication: I feel the communication to users has decreased over time. I appreciate a platform that makes changes to improve the user experience, but I don't feel I am informed of updates. I will go into the dashboard and notice that something has changed or moved unexpectedly. Now I have to go to Google and dig around to find what changed and how to use the new setup. I wish they would go back to creating updated video tutorials.

The chrome extension is very glitchy, please fix.

I would like to be able to compare one client's links to another's and be given a list of sites that ones has a link from but not the other.

Raven is not a 1-1 match to the modules in Google Analytics. There are still reports that we get from GA and combine with our RavenTools report.

Raven does not retroactively pick up some social data. If you forget to set social tracking up on day one, you're in trouble.

Overall learning curve could be improved

I wouldn't mind seeing webinars or videos on tricks to get to most of the product

Managing keywords was a little goofy with a long list

More detailed reporting from AdWords

Additional customization options for reports

Smarter SEO site auditing - it can review things using rigid criteria, but doesn't offer the kind of nuanced analysis that a trained SEO analyst can deliver.

There is no initial workflow. In order words, in setting up a new site, there is no checklist, really, of what all configurations and settings are needed. We would greatly appreciate having a set-up wizard to take us through the entire set-up process. We're continually finding new, cool areas that we have missed configuring.

The online help is, in some places, dated and needs to be updated.

I've stopped using the automated reports. They still arrive in my inbox every Monday morning, but they're not providing the data I need. One, the great looking graphs that you see online are replaced with really bland graphics that often have scale issues (e.g., the vertical axis on the bounce rate graph goes up to 400% making it impossible to see any kind of variation). Two, you can't drill down the data you want reported. It won't report specific data like conversion rates for mobile and tablet users vs. desktop users. It only reports generic metrics which are rarely actionable and usually don't mean a thing. Three, there are often formatting issues within the report (not a huge issue, but it does look bad when I'm sending it to executives). Four, it's really difficult to make sweeping changes to different reports. If you decide there's a specific stat you want to include in the reports you've already created (not too specific, mind you, because that's not possible), it takes a long time and a lot of effort to make the changes.

The analytics portion of RavenTools leaves much to be desired. It's basically a reformatting of what you can find in Google Analytics, but without all of the flexibility. I would much rather see my web stats in GA where I can drill down the data and make better comparisons across acquisition, behavior, and conversions. RavenTools recently redesigned the analytics portion of its website to present the numerical data found underneath the line graph on top in a different way, but it mostly just turned it into a sea of red and green boxes that is difficult to read.

The SEO portion of RavenTools isn't very user friendly and doesn't adequately explain what certain metrics are and how they're calculated. For instance, under Campaign->Site Performance, it shows SEO metrics for your site compared to competitors' sites. Two of the metrics provided by Magestic SEO (Trust Flow and Citation Flow) have the exact same definition and are apparently calculated "by the number citations (sic) to a given URL, (sic) or domain." That tells me nothing. Also, there's no explanation for why Majestic SEO and Moz calculate backlinks so differently. When there's a difference of nearly 100% in those statistics, it make you wonder how accurate they are and what they're actually measuring.

There are content errors found throughout the RavenTools website. This doesn't necessarily affect the functionality (except when those errors prevent you from understanding what a certain metric is and how it's calculated), but it does reflect on the quality of the service in general. I tend to distrust websites that are full of textual errors, and it tells me that they don't put a lot of effort into the user experience (especially since some of the most glaringly obvious errors haven't been fixed in more than a year).

The data it gets from Webmaster Tools and Analytics is great and reporting on it is easy - however, when you're looking at the charts for keyword placement on screen the graphic can be hard to read and often I find myself just checking GWT and BWT separately for easier information if no report needs to be generated.

RavenTools comes with an iPhone app so you can check on your campaigns and clients when you're not at your desk, however, the app crashes quite a bit when you get to the Google Analytics portion of the screen.

The one thing I think RavenTools can improve on is implementing Reputation Management functionality into it's application. Since Reputation Management is a crucial aspect companies are looking to have focused on and taken care of effectively, I believe that they can utilize their existing tools to get a great head start with this functionality. In my humble opinion they've had a great product over the course of seven years, and still do, however, keeping up with the marketing trends such as Reputation Management is a key factor in the longevity of their users.

From what I saw, the reporting could be more customizable. It was pretty darn good, but if we're talking improvements, that's one area I noticed things could be better.

The UI was great, but it could use some tightening up. This is just if I'm being picky. It's fine as is but moving forward it'd be cool to see it evolve.

Being able to click a button to print out report. Sometimes the data didn't match exactly what we saw in other reports, so we couldn't rely so much on the day parting optimizations. This may be fixed now.

I can't think of anything at this time.

Regarding pulling in information from PPC - being limited to Google created an issue when it came to reporting as we also ran campaigns through Adcenter. Being exclusive to Google information is a little shortsighted.

Not being able to pull more detailed and specific reports from Google Analytics was limiting as well. Only getting the dashboard and being able to segment by Paid vs non-paid was limiting when trying to drill down.

The HTML functionality was a little clunky and could be very frustrating for those who aren't really skilled with it but need the functionality. Making a more user-friendly WYSIWYG would go a long way as not all online marketers are programmers.

Plan limitations - number of keywords and domains that you can track on the basic plan isn't the best.

Cost - slightly high for what you get.

Speed - always felt it was painfully slow running reports and jumping around within my RavenTools dashboard.

While RavenTools was a very effective tool, some features were not fully recognizable and many first time users will miss many important tools or will find that the learning curve can be steep.

I've found that some other SEO campaign tracking tools have their data refreshed more often than RavenTools does.

The reports are very amateurish. The graphs are too big and the size can't be changed. Even with the customization they offer (adding your logo) the reports are too basic looking to present to clients. They are also all in black and white, which is a huge issue for us. They're just not impressive enough to show clients.

The keyword ranking system is difficult to understand because they use a different method than some other search ranking monitoring services that are on the market. They aren't very good at explaining the discrepancies between their software and their competitors'.

Customizing the reports is too time consuming.

It was difficult when the tool stopped providing keywords used for organic Google searches a few years ago.

When the product we repositioned as a digital marketing platform vs. an SEO platform, use of it as a standalone SEO package became more difficult

Many elements of the program overlap with other reporting and tools we already have from other vendors, and need to be supplemented with additional details before our reports are ready to share internally.

SERP Tracking - compared to MOZtools, Raven's SERP tracking is a bit more difficult to handle. Having easy to use actionable dashboard charts are something that was sorely needed.

SEO Management - it may not be the bread and butter of the suite, but I feel like Moz does this better. It was why I switched over to Moz.

Generally, I love this tool, however I would add a section for Google Plus.

The Raven Toolbar needs serious improvement. Ever since they launched the new RavenTools in the fall of 2013, the Google Chrome extension toolbar has been glitchy, difficult to use, and frustrating.

The tracking software can be glitchy and will sometimes record links as active/inactive incorrectly. This isn't always true, but it has happened a few times.

While the key word ranking tools are second to none, I'd still like to see a platform lead the market, providing business performance data from organic search rank, and not just position

Key word rank by location is missing and search results, today, being personalized. makes location very relevant to every business

Depth of toolset—This might have changed in the interim but the level of analysis the tools provided was very input/output—you input data in the tool, you get a report of the data you input. Monitoring was a nice layer, but you can't go wild with filters and entering a data wormhole like you can with seoClarity or BrightEdge.

"Useful" integrations—Raven was very much a tool built around reporting. When I say "useful," I don't mean to imply that the integrations were worthless—they just weren't things you could USE very well. They were more there to easily input into a report. The exception to this was the keyword research toolset.

Use as an enterprise tool—Agency life and in-house life are two very different things. This tool definitely satisfies the needs of the former more than the latter, especially for smaller agencies who are less integrated with their clients.