Introducing New and Improved Citation Builder Reports

Introducing New and Improved Citation Builder Reports

We’re really pleased to announce that we’ve released new and improved Citation Builder reports!

This update will help you:

  • Easily understand the progress of your Citation Builder campaigns
  • React quickly to any actions you need to take
  • Share reports with clients and stakeholders in a more visually appealing way

Before I dive into the details of what’s changed, let’s take a look at what Citation Builder reports looked like before:

Citation Builder Old Report

Pretty tired looking, right?

Rather than simply give these reports a fresh lick of paint, we wanted to truly make them more useful to our customers. We considered the role that these reports play and explored how we could make the information easier to understand, all while reducing the chances of campaigns hitting blockers.

Here’s what the report looks like now:

Citation Builder New Report

Clearly it’s a big visual upgrade, but let me walk you through each of the improvements.

Actions required

We actually released this improvement at the end of last year because we knew it would help customers overcome a common pain point—campaign delays.

While our team takes every step possible to build and update listings on your behalf, some sites require verification from you or your client before we can progress. To help speed up this process, we’ve added alerts at the top of the report to flag any actions you need to take.

Actions Required

Campaign status

​​This section gives a top level overview of how many campaigns you’ve run for a location and the status of any Data Aggregators you’ve purchased. Importantly, you’ll now be able to see if any Data Aggregators are due to expire or have already expired. From here, you can quickly start the process to renew them.

Citation Campaign Status

Campaign progress

This progress bar lets you quickly see how your campaign is progressing and gives you greater insights into the timeline to completion. It’ll also let you know when a campaign is on hold and what steps you need to take to progress the campaign. For example, if we’re waiting on extra information from you or if you need to verify a listing.

Campaign Progress

You also now have easy access to all the campaigns you’ve run for a location and can navigate between them using the dropdown.

Submission status

These cards allow you to get more detail on the progress of a campaign and they’ll update as each citation is worked on. You’ll be able to see how many submissions are in progress, how many are live or updated, and whether we’ve offered replacement sites when we’re unable to create a listing.

Submission Status

Citations table

The table has had a big visual upgrade. It’s now much easier to see the status of each submission, information about a site, and links to your completed listings.

Citations Table

White-label reports

All of these updates are available within your white-label reports, which makes it easier for you to communicate progress to clients or stakeholders. And, of course, reports are now much more visually impressive—we hope you’ll be proud to share them!

A clearer, easier to navigate Citation Builder overview

The improvements aren’t just limited to reports. We’ve also given the Citation Builder overview dashboard an overhaul, giving you more clarity on the progress of every campaign in your account. You’ll now get alerts on action to take across all campaigns that are in progress.

Citation Builder Overview

There’s also improved search functionality and filtering so you can quickly get to the right reports.

Emails that get to the point

Finally, we’ve updated our campaign progress emails. They now contain clearer information on the overall progression of a campaign and any outstanding actions.

Citation Builder Email

Better communication = better service

Our local citation building service is now operating at an incredible scale. Thousands of agencies and businesses rely on our service each month. In 2021, our team managed over 1.25 million citations for our customers!

As we scale, it’s vital that we continue to look at our service and see how things can be made better. Our reports were definitely an area that needed to be working harder for our customers, so that information can be communicated in a clear and concise manner.

We hope that these improvements will go a long way to improving your overall experience of using Citation Builder. Head over to your account to see all the updates.

Kristian Bannister
About the author
Kristian is BrightLocal's Director of Product and Marketing. He'll pop up on the blog to let our audience know about big things happening at BrightLocal and in the local SEO industry. Kristian draws from a decade of SEO experience and has spent the last few years working in SaaS companies.