Item: Conductor
Rating: 9
Author: Brandon Morris

Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The interface is utilized by people across multiple facets of the business, but is primarily used by employees on the Audience Acquisition Team. We have an extensive long tail organic search presence, so tracking rankings and analytics across a wide swath of subject areas is integral to our ability to grow and protect search real estate.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The tagging configuration and the ability to apply preferred URLs to keywords is essential to us. None of the main competitors to Conductor have functionality like this, and ensuring that the page we want to rank is the one showing up in SERPs is a huge benefit.
The partnerships that Conductor has created are unparalleled by any other company in the industry. The ability to pull data from multiple (already utilized) tools makes it an extremely efficient, time-saving tool.
A lot of the capabilities that the interface has are not available anywhere else (i.e. unlimited users, unlimited exports, useful site audits etc.). In addition to that functionality the team that we have worked with for on-boarding has been fantastic and extremely helpful.

Cons

Due to the amount of keywords we need to track we have to spread them among multiple accounts, which makes reporting and dashboards a little more difficult. The team is helping us with that though.
In some respects I think that the overall architecture of the interface could be tweaked to make it more intuitive. All the tools are great, but in some regards the naming conventions make it difficult to ascertain in advance exactly what type of data you will be given. This is especially true for users who aren't in the interface very often.
There are some filter types that I would like to see developed by the team. Namely it would be nice to be able to filter based on preferred URL. Our content is so long tail and location based that we really need to know that the URL we are attempting to track is the one represented in the data.

Return on Investment

This is very difficult to answer at this current juncture. We have recently on-boarded with Conductor and are still taking in all of the great data that using the interface affords. We also have a number of large content initiatives coming up for the rest of the year that we will want to track, so data on ROI is tough to pin down right now.

Support Rating

The support is great. The team that we have worked with is fantastic and always very responsive. Even the interface "help" functionality is awesome. Any of the times that I've needed help figuring something out or requesting more information, the chat functionality really does have a ~1 response time. I had figured this was probably something tossed out as more of a selling point item, but it turns out this was absolutely a legitimate claim.

Alternatives Considered

Search Metrics and BrightEdge

We elected to move from another tool to Conductor in large amount because of the partnerships that they have with other partners. The integration of different tool sets that we already were using is time saving and more cost efficient. The team at Conductor is also extremely responsive and helpful in ensuring that we are accomplishing everything that we want with the tool.

Likelihood to Recommend

Conductor is a great tool, especially for people who work with multiple tools geared towards search analytics (Webmaster Tools, Adobe, SEMRush etc.). The ability to combine traffic metrics with along with site health factors and keyword opportunities is great to have in one place. It saves time, and helps streamline data to make its users more efficient.

Conductor Feature Ratings

Using Conductor Searchlight

Usability

This is a tough one. I gave Conductor a 7 because I think the naming conventions on the different functional areas of the interface is very much internal product usage. As a newer user I often have difficulty knowing exactly which section I should use to pull a particular data set. In addition, the fact that our large keyword base is spread across 3 different accounts is hard because we need to rely on the Conductor team to create custom configurations of data for us to use in the workspace area.

Comments

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Joe Taylor
(Vendor Representative) commented 8 years ago
Brandon: thank you for taking time to write such a detailed review. We use this info to further improve our offering and your specifics are what we hope for. The good news about your critical feedback is we are addressing your specific feedback in the near-term. We've heard loud and clear from customers like you that our naming conventions could be more intuitive, and we are going to be making changes with that goal in mind. I believe you'll be able to see this in Q2, along with our new role-based user views. I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying our overall partnership approach--both in terms of CS and our Data Partners. There are so many incredible and smart companies in the space and we love bringing them in as partners. We actually just announced our most recent partner, LinkResearchTools, to bring the highest quality link data we've seen. Thank you again for the review and please never hesitate to let us know how we could be doing better for Healthgrades. Joe Taylor Sr. Director, Customer Success jtaylor@conductor.com

Conductor is a Best in Class Tool