Cyfe Review

Cyfe business dashboard screenshot.
Cyfe Business Dashboard
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A few weeks ago I was asked by the folks over at Cyfe if I’d be willing to do a review of their service. As a note to anyone pondering asking the same they worded it in the only way I’ll accept, “Whether you like it or not all we ask is for an honest review.” Here’s why I like that:

A – it means I can accept it as I never give a good review for something I don’t like, and
B – it means they’re confident in what they’re offering

After playing around with the service for a bit I can fully understand why they had their confidence and it fits right into my wheelhouse of tools I’ll use. One of the big issues with a lot of tools, even some I use, is that they claim to be able to tell you what to do. This assumes that a small rafting company is placed in the same boat as Wikipedia. This is obviously not the case. Of course with experience you can quickly learn which recommendations apply to you and which don’t but for someone just entering the field of SEO or trying to DIY it themselves it can be misleading and see them exhausting efforts that could better be put elsewhere.

In the case of Cyfe however it offers virtually nothing in the way of direction, what it does it provides an interface to quickly review what’s actually going on with your marketing efforts. I won’t be able to cover all the different things it does so I won’t even try past an explanation of what it does at it’s core.

When you first login to Cyfe you are presented with a blank canvas. You are them asked to configure the widgets you would like to see on your dashboard. Worth noting, you can configure different dashboards so you can separate clients, you can separate needs (email vs organic for example) or you can pile it all into one dashboard if you wish.

The types of data you can include are:

Advertising – showing your metrics for paid search including AdSense.
Blogging – right now they just have WordPress but it’ll display posts, comments, frequency, etc.
Email – they sync up with some of the major email marketing providers like Constant Contacts to display your metrics
Monitoring – they can pull your alerts from Google Alerts or display Google Trending data. Very helpful for seasonal folks.
Sales & Finance – they can pull your info from services like Salesforce or FreshBooks to show your data there.
SEO – they can pull data from Google Search Console, Moz or directly from the SERPs
Social Media – they can pull your social stats
Support – right now they only have Desk and Zendesk but you can get your support data pulled
Web Analytics – and or course they can display your Analytics, Compete data, Unbounce, Alexa, etc. to display

There are other aspects of your site health you can pull and even Google Docs if you’re interested but i can’t list it all here. This led me of course to a security question regarding this data.

When I asked them about how security of data is handled the reply was:

“We use Amazon Web Services as our infrastructure so the data would be stored in a very secure environment. Keep in mind that we’re a software service comparable to services like Google Docs, Office 365, and even Google Analytics itself. And nobody in our own company can even access your data and dashboards. So for support/troubleshooting, we have users send screenshots (or share access) to diagnose the problems that way.

Like any other SaaS application, rest assured that we handle all data going in and out of Cyfe very carefully. Naturally, security is our top priority. For the most part we use the OUATH protocol to connect to clients’ external accounts so we don’t store any login credentials. In instances where it’s necessary to store information, we use encryption algorithms. We have over 125,000 users that trust us like AT&T, Marriott, Microsoft, and Groupon so you’re in good hands.”

Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words so let’s take a look at the dashboard.  I’ll note, this is a screenshot from their own site as I’m not about to make our client data (or my own) public but I’ll vouch for the fact that this screenshot is accurate.  I have mine set to different data for each need but this is a great example.

Cyfe business dashboard screenshot.

Now imagine different dashboards for different needs.  One of my favorites with seasonal industries is to display the core metrics like analytics and social sharing and place it next to keyword trending so when we see big rises and falls we can put it into the context of what’s going on globally.

They do have a free version which I recommend (the price is sure right) though I have the premium version so I’ll admit I don’t know all the limitations it may have.

I’ll leave it at that and let you be the judge.  I’d love to hear about your experiences so feel free to drop a comment below.  You can visit their site for the free version or premium (for a whopping $14/mth).  I figure that if it saves be anything more than about 10 minutes per month or help me see just one thing I might have missed it’s more than paid for itself.

2 thoughts on “Cyfe Review

  1. You bring up a really good point man, and that is that all the tools in the world are only as good as the user. All the metrics and analytics and everything else, we as SEO’s have to utilize them – that direction you speak of in your post – that’s the users job! (our job)

  2. An important takeaway to be sure Matt and it’s great to hear you agree. I’m sure your clients are even happier about it than I am. 🙂

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