Groups are collections of pages. The scope allows you to focus in and work with the data from any group of pages. Together these two features give you a lot of control over how you work with your data.

Groups

To create a group, navigate to the inventory and select some results from the list. Once you've made a selection click the "Selected" button, then choose "Create group from selected...". Next, give your group a name and you're done! When you're ready to work within a group, select it from the "Scope" dropdown at the top of the page. More on the scope below.

Create groups from selected results in the inventory

Scope

Like a microscope, the scope control lets you focus in on a particular set of data. By default the scope is set to "All pages", and will show all the data that Content Auditor found when crawling your site. When you choose a group in the scope, Content Auditor will ignore any data that's not in that group.

Report

On the report page set the scope to generate reports for the group of your choice. This gets you high-level insights on any subset of your data.

Inventory

On the inventory page, setting the scope limits your results to pages within the selected group. This can be useful when your full crawl data includes unwanted pages, or when you want to work on a specific section of your content. See below for some examples of how to use the scope and groups together.

Use cases

Here are a few real world examples to give you a better idea of how groups and scope can be used.

Data cleaning :

It's fairly common for Content Auditor to find pages that aren't relevant to your audit. For example, the crawler might find hundreds or even thousands of dynamically generated pages. If you have an interactive calendar, or endless paginated lists of content, Content Auditor will dutifully click through each and every link it finds, adding extra bulk to your crawl data. This can become problematic because all those extra pages will skew your results - for starters Content Auditor could report thousands more pages than expected. In this case you'll want to take a subtractive approach. Start by creating a group that contains ALL your pages, then use the filters to identify pages you don't need and remove them from the group. Once you've got the group containing only the pages that you need, you can set the scope to focus in on it and get an updated report and inventory that only includes useful data.

Focus on one section of your site:

Say you're working on a massive site with thousands of pages. Chances are you're not going to tackle it all at once. You might decide to run an audit on your blog, or on your help documentation. Use the inventory filters to find all the pages in a given section and create a group (ie. by searching for "/blog/" in the URL). Once your group is created, use the scope control to get reports and inventories specific to that group. This allows you to make observations and comparisons about the different sections in your site. How many pages are in the blog section? How many in the help section? Which section generally has higher reading levels? Are certain kinds of quality issues more prevalent in one area? Getting high level insights on a per-section basis can help you make decisions about where to focus your energies next.

Focus on problem content:

Use the filters to identify content that you want to fix, then create a group from those results. You might collect all the pages with a high reading grade, or all the pages missing a title. You can now work within this group without getting distracted by irrelevant content. Use the inventory as a task list to assess content quality, or export a CSV of problematic pages to hand off to another team member.