In May we announced the latest addition to the Deepcrawl platform – Monitor Hub. Designed to drastically cut time spent monitoring multiple domains or large, complex websites, Monitor Hub helps you easily detect changes and trends that impact site performance, and identify where to focus your attention. Smart Alerts also help save time keeping notifications relevant, with automatic updates to new thresholds based on previous crawl data.
What is Monitor Hub?
Monitor Hub gives you a high-level view of all your domains, or sections of your site, in one place. A scannable table means you can quickly spot changes and trends that need attention, and customizable alerts will notify you in-app or via email, Slack or Microsoft Teams when a threshold has been breached.
Core benefits:
- Focus your attention and take swift action. Act quickly with custom alerts and a scannable overview of multiple domains or sections of your site in one place.
- Focus on the metrics that matter most. Avoid the noise with a customizable view that allows you to focus on the most relevant data.
- Spot trends and prove investment cases. Easily see when a metric is moving in the wrong direction, and provide evidence to secure investment.
- Save time spent manipulating data. Spot issues and trends from within Deepcrawl. No need to download and manipulate data in spreadsheets.
Who is Monitor Hub For?
Monitor Hub brings benefits to a number of organizations, principally:
- Multi-domain brands. For organizations with multiple brands, it can be difficult to stay on top of the technical health of each brand site, and quickly identify issues or SEO trends. With a high-level overview of all sites in one place, technical SEOs and digital leaders can get a quick view of how their sites are performing, and quickly spot trends or issues that need addressing. Customized alerts also helps ensure issues are quickly rectified.
- SEO Agencies. Just like multi-domain brands, agencies also need to stay on top of the technical health of multiple brands, but for their clients rather than their own organization. With Monitor Hub, agencies can easily track their customers’ websites for spikes or trends, and receive alerts of technical health issues or trends that need addressing.
- Large Websites and International Brands. For businesses with very large and complex websites, staying on top of all site areas can be just as challenging as managing multiple brands. With Monitor Hub, you can see an overview of all the important parts of your site in one place, such as different product or content categories, or different geographies, so you can spot trends or issues in particular areas of your site.
Monitor Hub Dashboards
Once Monitor Hub is enabled for your account, you can see all existing Analytics Hub scheduled crawls across four pre-built dashboards:
- Content – covering metrics such as broken links, missing descriptions, missing H1 tags, empty pages, etc.
- Performance – showing good and poor Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), fast and slow Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), slow server responses, etc.
- Sitemaps – including pages without canonical tags, broken sitemap links, non-indexable URLs in sitemaps, orphaned sitemaps pages, etc.
- Technical Health – covering 301 redirects, broken pages (4xx errors), 5xx errors, failed URLs, etc.
You’ll see these dashboards in the left navigation, and can click onto each one to load the data. As you add new scheduled crawls in Analytics Hub, the data will become available in Monitor Hub.
With each dashboard, you’ll see the trend lines for each metric and each project. Within each cell, you’ll see the following information:
- The total number of pages in the last crawl for the relevant metric.
- The absolute change in the number of pages compared with the previous crawl.
- The % of difference in pages compared to the previous crawl.
Clicking on the relevant trend graph will take you to the corresponding report in Analytics Hub.
Sorting Projects
You can sort the project list in the dashboard table by A-Z, Z-A or by the newest or oldest crawl. By default, this is set to the newest crawl. You’ll see how the list is currently sorted next to ‘Title’ on the left hand side, and can change the sort by clicking on the three dots next to the current sort description.
Filtering Dashboards
Click on ‘Filter’ at the top right of the dashboard table to access the filter options. You can use AND/OR tools to hone in on the specific data that’s important to you. For example, you can use this feature to filter the dashboard a specific set of domains.
Changing Columns
You can also change the metric that appears in table columns. Simply hover your mouse over the column you want to change and click ‘edit’. You can then choose from any of the default Deepcrawl reports. Currently, you can choose up to 6 columns of metrics to appear in each row.
Comparing Metrics Across Projects
At the top of the dashboard, you’ll see a graph that allows you to compare specific metrics across different projects. Use the drop down in the top left of the graph to change the metric, and the drop down in the top right to select up to 10 projects that will appear in the graph.
By default, the last 30 days will be shown on the graph, but you can change this to the last 7 days, last 90 days or last 6 months, using the options in the middle. One thing to note here is that we currently show 30 data points per trend, so when comparing different data sets it’s important to have crawls of similar regularity (i.e. daily or weekly) in the graph.
Creating, Cloning, Renaming and Deleting a New Dashboard
To create a new dashboard, all you need to do is click on the + sign next to ‘My Dashboards’ in the top left of the screen. Your new dashboard will appear in the left hand side, with a set of metrics included. You can then change the metrics for each column to the data you need for that particular dashboard.
You can also clone a dashboard by clicking ‘New’ in the top right of the screen and choose ‘Clone dashboard’. You’ll be prompted to give the new dashboard a name and it will appear in the dashboard list so you can amend as required.
To rename or delete a dashboard, simply hover over the dashboard until you see the three dots to the right of the name. You can then click to rename or delete the dashboard.
Customizable Alerts
Monitor Hub allows you to customize alerts, so you can be notified when core thresholds are breached. Alerts are available in-app, and also via push notifications to email, Slack and Teams.
Creating Alerts
In the top right of the page, click on the dropdown next to ‘New’ and choose ‘Create new alert’.
Choose the project that you’d like to set the alert for and you’ll be taken to the rules and thresholds settings, which will look like this:
Here, you can now specify the settings for the threshold:
- Severity. Choose between a warning or critical alert. Warnings will be notified in-app, whereas any critical alerts will also come through as push notifications to email, Slack or Teams. This helps ensure you are only interrupted for the most critical issues.
- Metric. Choose the metric you’d like to set the alert for. You can choose from any of the default Deepcrawl reports.
- Threshold. Choose ‘greater than or equal to’ or ‘less than’, and then specify the number of URLs for the threshold. To the right hand side, you’ll see the latest trend graph for the metric, with the current threshold as a red dotted line. As you amend the threshold the red line will update immediately to help you set an appropriate level. Here you’ll also see the total number of pages in the last crawl for the relevant metric, the absolute change in the number of pages and the % of difference.
- Smart Alerts. Here you can select if you would like Monitor Hub’s Smart Alerts to automatically update thresholds based on previous crawl data. See below for more information on Smart Alerts.
Once you have created your first rule, you can add more by using the ‘+ Add new rule’ link underneath the existing alert/s. You can also easily edit the alerts by clicking onto the relevant alert and changing the settings – just remember to hit Save once you’ve made your changes.
Smart Alerts
To keep alerts effective over time with minimal effort, Monitor Hub’s Smart Alerts will automatically set new alert thresholds for you based on your recent crawl data. Alternatively, you can decide whether to manually accept or reject the new thresholds Monitor Hub suggests. You can even choose to automatically accept new thresholds when an issue improves, but suggest when an issue gets worse, or vice-versa.
When an issue improves consistently, the alert threshold should be updated in-line with the improvements to prevent a gulf appearing between your initial threshold and the new level of your report (meaning you might miss new issues). So, if a threshold has not been breached in the past 5 crawls, Monitor Hub will set or suggest a new threshold:
- For greater than or equal to rules, this will be the highest value from the last five crawls plus 1.
- For less than rules, it will be the lowest value from the last five crawls.
When an issue gets worse (i.e. when a notification is triggered) it may take some time to fix the issue. The alert threshold should be updated to the new status quo to prevent multiple alerts for an issue you’re already aware of, but still notify you if the issue gets even worse. So, if a notification is triggered, a new threshold will be set or suggested:
- For greater than or equal to rules, this will be the most recent value plus 1.
- For less than rules, it will be the most recent value.
If you have set Smart Alerts to automatically accept, the alerts will update and all new notifications will be at the new level.
If you are manually accepting Monitor Hub’s suggestions, you can go through each suggestion and accept or reject as required. Accepted suggestions will be updated and all new notifications will be at the new level, while rejected suggestions will leave the threshold and notifications at the previously set level.
Editing or Deleting Rules and Alerts
From the home screen, click on the Notifications icon in the left hand navigation.
This will take you to your notifications. In the top right corner of the screen, you’ll see an option to ‘Manage Alerts’. You can then choose the relevant project to make any changes to the rules for that alert.
- Use the trash can icon next to the relevant rule to delete that rule.
- To delete the entire alert, use the larger trash can icon at the top.
- The ‘Copy to’ option allows you to copy all rules to another project. Just choose the project you want to copy to. If there are already rules in the project you’re copying to, the new rules will be added to the project alert. If a rule already exists for a specific metric, the new rule will be prioritized over the existing one, and overwrite it
Actioning Alerts
To access your alerts, click on the Notification icon in the left-hand navigation. This will take you to a summary of your notifications.
- Information about the alert the notification relates to. This includes the metric affected, the change from the previous crawl (in absolute numbers and percentages), and the number of URLs in relation to the rule settings.
- The rule that is triggering the alert. You can use the pencil icon to edit the rule.
- The project the notification relates to.
- On the right hand side, you’ll also see a summary of information, the trend graph for previous crawls and the date and time of the notification.
- Clicking the gear icon will take you to the manage alerts page.
- You can also mark the notification as ‘Archive’ or ‘Working on it’ so other people seeing the notification know if it has been actioned.
From the alerts screen, you can click into the main body of the notification to be taken to the relevant report in Analytics Hub, so you can quickly see more information and diagnose the issue.
You can also see notifications by clicking on the notification in the top right corner of the dashboard screen.
Find Out More
If you’d like to take a look at Monitor Hub, request a demo today.