If you’ve been in SEO a while you’ll most likely have come across ScreamingFrog, as a content marketer or PR, probably not so much.
If you’re needing to aggregate multiple sources of information for that content audit or PR campaign from Google Analytics, Ahrefs or Majestic for example, ScreamingFrog will allow you to collect everything in one go without needing to aggregate multiple spreadsheets.
To do this we will walk through how to use ScreamingFrog to link up with Google Analytics and Ahrefs using it’s API connectors. There’s a step by step guide on how to do this below, or a handy video tutorial.
Step 1 – connecting Google Analytics
- Login into your Google Analytics and Ahrefs account
- Click on Configuration – API Access – Google Analytics
- Click Connect to New Account
- Select the account you want to connect up if you have a few different logins to Google.
Step 2 – connecting Ahrefs
- Click on the appropriate account you want to authorise and follow the prompts to connect.
- Click on Configuration – API Access – Ahrefs
- Click generate an APi access token (1)
- Authorise access when prompt and you will be served with the API key
- Copy the API key and paste into the ScreamingFrog Ahrefs window above (2).
Step 3 – Using the connectors to extract data
Now that you have created the connections for ScreamingFrog to be able to access Google Analytics and Ahrefs, you need to tell it to use these connections each time you do a crawl.
For Google Analytics data
- Click on Configuration – API Access – Google Analytics
- Select the existing account that you have just set up and click connect
- Once connected you will need to select the appropriate account, property and view that you would like to pull information from.
- Then choose the date range and metrics and conversions you would like to include in the crawl from the other tabs and click ok.
- TIP – be sure to select the General Tab and choose Match Trailing and Non-Trailing Slash URLs and also Match Uppercase & Lowercase URLs, this will help consolidate URLs.
For Ahrefs data
- Click on Configuration – API Access – Ahrefs
- Your API Key should still exist in the data window – and click on Connect
- If everything is connected up properly then the window will populate with some information regarding how many requests you have left for the API
- Again select the appropriate metrics you would like to extract from the API
Your data sources are now ready to populate for the URLs you will crawl.
Step 4 – Crawling URLs
ScreamingFrog has a few modes of operation. Here we will focus on its list mode operation which assumes you have a list of URLs you would like to aggregate information for.
- Select Mode – List from the menu then select upload and choose the appropriate method for URL entry. If you have copied the URLs already you can click on paste and they will be pasted from the clipboard.
- It will now crawl and collect information from the API for the URLs entered. Wait until the Crawl and API reach 100%
- Once it’s complete. The internal tab gives you all the information for the URLs crawled. Scrolling towards the right you will find the metrics for the Google Analytics and Ahrefs data requested.
- Clicking on the drop down arrow to the right of the top row of tabs will also allow you to segment for just the Google Analytics or Ahrefs data.
- The final step is to export the data for analysis. To do this there are two main ways of exporting. There is the main export button next to the Upload button or there are separate exports available for the different tab views.
Feel free to get in touch if there are any other questions or tutorials you would like to see.
