Campaign data via API

[PPCnSEO]

I am currently in the process of building an in house system for managing our clients SEO campaigns.

One of the features that we will be including is a customer login where clients can view their reports and site progress.

We plan on providing rankings and traffic stats within this which we will collect on a weekly basis to store historical changes.

While I could integrate into analytics for traffic and create my own web crawler for rankings, this seems a waste since I already have that data in one central location.

Looking through the moz API details it seems to have lots of functions for links but nothing relating to the campaigns.

Is there any way or are there any plans to open up campaign data to an API?

If I could do this I would certainly upgrade to allow each client to have their own campaign.

[Campaignium]

Did this just fall into a black hole? What happened?

[The_Tela]

Hi Thomas -

We are actively working on a campaigns API. This API will be for Moz Analytics, which is still in closed beta. I don't have a firm timeframe, but because of this dependency I wouldn't expect we would be able to launch this API before Q4.

Thanks for your continued interest in this data source, and for explaining your need. We're working on it!

Cheers,

Tela

[divergens]

Any update available on when it will be possible tp get Campaign data through the API? Being able to get historic ranking data is essential in evaluating which service (Moz, seoanalytics, searchmetrics or webceo) to use.

Kind regards, Thomas

[The_Tela]

Hi Adrian -

My apologies for the delayed response. We don't have any moral or philisophical objection to scraping. You are just trying to be more efficient about how you access your own data, after all.

The concern on our end lies entirely with how scraping could negatively impact other customers by creating a high load on our systems. Our own crawlers have built-in politeness capabilities that are conservative and we prohibit scraping because we can't ensure that others will do the same to us. If we gave blanket permission for scraping, this could lead to site performance or availability issues due to unpredictable loads.

The API is built to handle these larger and more condensed requests for data, so would be a natural choice. I'm actively working on a solution for your needs. This capability won't be ready before Q4 of this year. In fact, I would love to get your feedback on these features in a private thread.

I realize that the load you will generate will be low, but unfortunately I cannot grant permission for you to scrape this data.

[adriandg]

I'm not sure i completely follow. how would scraping campaign data generate any more load than usual usage?  In fact if i pulled my campaigns out once a week and cached them, i would be reducing the load on seo moz because i wouldn't be checking back frequently to see ranking data, as i would have it available in my own custom viewer.

EDIT: infact, there is a CSV export of rankings, which is even smaller to pull than loading the page itself in a browser.  So i would be using even less data than viewing my rankings once per week.

EDIT2: It's kind of ironic building a business around scraping and then condemning scraping.  Have all the websites SEO Moz scrapes given their explicit permission to be scraped?  What about all the websites Google scrapes? And then they turn around and condemn scraping.  The whole concept of a scraper condemning scraping is absolutely absurd.

[The_Tela]

Hi adriandg,

We have begun work on this as part of some more extensive work around our APIs. However, we likely won't be able to offer APIs for campaigns in the first half of this year.

I completely understand your wish to scrape the data yourself, and I really appreciate you asking permission first. Unfortunately we can't grant permission to scrape campaign data for a few reasons, including the load it generates. I would ask you to please wait for our API which will allow you to do this.

The good news is that we are actively working on this, and understand our customers' needs for this.

Tela

[adriandg]

Is there any progress with this? Will there ever be API access to the campaign data?  Would it be frowned upon if i simply scraped the data out of my own campaigns?

Thanks,
Storwell

[adamf]

Hi Mark,

I really like this idea, but at the moment we do not offer API access to the data in campaigns.

We have discussed this internally, and while we think it would make sense in the longer term, we do not have any near-term plans to offer this. We will revisit discussion about this capability around the second half of 2012 and will certainly take your situation into consideration as we look at prioritization of API access for campaigns.

Sorry I can't be of more help right now.

Adam