Anomaly Detection: Easily identify significant irregularities in your search performance

Take a second to think - what can you achieve in 4 hours at work? It’s probably a decent amount, considering that 4 hours is 10% of a typical workweek.

Recent internal research has found that nearly 40% of website owners spend more than 4 hours a week using various tools to monitor and identify significant deviations in their search performance. Time well spent, but alas, time is increasingly finite.

It’s about time busy marketers and website owners got those 4 hours back. That’s why we created Anomaly Detection.

The Anomaly Detection report detects significant irregularities in impressions, clicks, CTR, and position and warns you so that you can react and counteract accordingly.

Figure 1: Anomaly Detection can be found in Search Success / Monitor / Anomalies.

How does Anomaly Detection actually work?

We start by calculating the expected range of your search performance using actual values (see Figure 2), statistics and historical dispersion, plus we control for additional variables such as seasonality, weekday variations, and trends.

This expected range of values is presented in light grey in a graph on the Search Success Dashboard (see Figure 1). If a metric of your search performance diverges from the expected range, it will be reported as an anomaly and you will receive an email alert. Downward deviations are shown in red and upward deviations in green. Because of the importance of detecting anomalies, Anomaly Detection will automatically check your search performance for irregularities every day.

Figure 2: The Anomaly Detection overview in the Search Success Dashboard.

Analyze your anomaly in detail

Click on a specific anomaly to see a detailed analysis. The corresponding report will show you which pages or keywords are affected by the anomaly and to what extent. By default, the data is sorted by the difference from the previous period before the anomaly, but you can also filter by keywords, pages, or clicks, or sort by metrics.

Figure 3: Example of a list of pages that have been impacted by an anomaly.

You can also check to see if the anomaly has impacted one particular area of your website more than another by filtering for directory or segment, but this requires a segment with at least 25 keywords and a minimum of two months of data.

Figure 4: Analyze anomalies according to directories or segments.

Customize your anomaly threshold

You can adjust Anomaly Detection according to your needs by increasing or decreasing the sensitivity threshold and configuring the automated email alerts. This way you will be informed as soon as your search performance deviates from your chosen range.

Figure 5: Set up Anomaly Detection email alerts.

Start working with Anomaly Detection

Saving 4 hours every week is just the start to the benefits of Anomaly Detection. More importantly, you will:

• Stay informed and avoid surprises: You and your team will always have a real-time understanding of search irregularities and can take action immediately to avoid performance loss.

• Save time, resources, and budget: Use the time/resources you saved finding the anomaly to eliminate the anomaly…and maybe work on other important things 😉