What is Task Manager?
Task Manager helps you increase productivity by scheduling and assigning tasks based on real report data. Tasks can be created from any of the Lumar reports, and users can be notified of updates for either specific tasks or all tasks, as new crawls complete.
Who is Task Manager For?
Task Manager is a great tool for both individual users and teams. Because you can set up tasks based on filtered reports, you can drill down into a specific issue that you want to keep an eye on, so you can track issues over time to keep on top of progress, or your most critical issues. And because Task Manager creates a trend line for your specific issue, you can visually see how an issue changes over time.
For teams, identified issues can be assigned to a specific user, with instructions of what needs to be done, priority levels, etc. This helps teams prioritize tasks and collaborate effectively on website technical health issues.
Video Walkthrough
Watch a quick walkthrough, or read on for everything you need to know to get the most out of Task Manager in Lumar Analyze.
Creating Tasks
From your project dashboard, navigate to the report that identifies the issue you want to track. For example, you might identify a particular stage of the traffic funnel that has a high proportion of traffic falling out.
If you’re using our health scores, you can drill down into a category and subcategory that needs addressing, or go straight to a specific report in the top errors of the overview.
Once you’re at the report you want to create the task for, you can select a specific segment if required, and apply any filters that you need to narrow the list down to the specific set of URLs that you need to address in the task.
With the filters applied, click on the ‘Create Task’ button just above the report table.
When the task details window opens up, you can complete the following details:
- Priority – Set from a simple note, or low, medium, high or critical priority.
- Deadline – Here you can set a date by which the task needs to be completed.
- Title – The main title of your task. We suggest being a little descriptive here, so use something like ‘URLs that need redirections set up’ rather than just ‘Redirections’ so the viewer will be able to get an idea of what the task relates to in the task list.
- Description – Here you can describe what needs to be done. We suggest putting as much detail in here as possible, so whoever is receiving the task knows what they need to do.
- Assignee email – Here you can assign one or more email addresses that will get notifications of the task being set up, and updates when new crawls complete.
Viewing Tasks
Once tasks have been created, you’ll see that the ‘Create Task’ button changes to show that there is 1 task associated with the report. If you need to create another task, click on the down arrow next to the task count and click ‘Add Task’.
You can also see the total number of tasks related to the overall project in the left-hand navigation. To view your tasks, click on Project Tasks and you’ll be taken to the product list.
You can also see all tasks across your account by clicking on the Account Tasks icon in the left hand navigation
For each task, you’ll see the following information by default:
- Severity. Either Note, Low, Medium, High or Critical. You can sort by this column by the highest or lowest severity.
- Task. Hover your mouse cursor over this area to see the full description.
- Status/Deadline. The date set for completion of the task. You can also sort by this column to see tasks in date order.
- Trend. As new crawls complete, you’ll see the trend line develop for up to the last 30 data points. If only one crawl has been completed
- Unresolved. The count of URLs for the task found in the latest crawl.
- % unresolved. The count of URLs for the task as a percentage of the count when the task was first created. If there are more URLs for the task now than when the task was created, this will be above 100%.
You can also use the Columns icon to see additional information:
- Report. The report the task was created from. If enabled you can click on this to go to the report.
- Created. The date the task was created.
- Identified. The count of URLs for the task when it was created.
- Assigned To. The users that have been assigned to the task, which can be very useful if you have a lot of assigned users.
- Link. The link to the report the task was created for.
Task Actions
From the task view, clicking on the Task will take you to the report the task was created from, so you can see affected URLs and fix the issues. Any filters you applied when the task was created will be in place, so you will see the exact same report.
As you fix issues from the report and new crawls complete, the number and percentage of unresolved issues will reduce.
At the end of the task view, you’ll see three dots in the ‘Actions’ column. Clicking here will allow you to:
- Mark as resolved. Once all issues have been addressed, you can resolve the task which will remove it from the list.
- Edit task, to amend any of the details, including the severity, deadline, etc.
- Remove, to delete the task.
As mentioned, once you have resolved a task it will disappear from the list. However, there is a toggle on the table which will allow you to show resolved tasks, and mark as unresolved if required. If you have designed a task to track a specific issue, it may be worth leaving it open so you can quickly see any recurrences that may arise.
Examples of How to Use Task Manager
To help you get started with Task Manager, we’ve included a few common ways our customers use it to track specific issues.
Track Soft 404s
Use All Pages report to filter by a common element of the page title which appears on a 404 template and a 200 status code.
| Report: | All Pages |
| Filters: | Page Title CONTAINS ‘Not Found’ HTTP Status Code EQUALS 200 |
Track broken links for specific sections
Use the All Broken Links report fo filter by broken links to your subfolder.
| Report: | Internal Broken Links |
| Filters: | Target URL CONTAINS <subfolder> e.g /blog/ |
Track Broken or Noindex Pages with High Impressions and Clicks
Use the reports to identify pages that go over a specific GSC threshold of your choice that may need investigation more urgently (e.g Redirects or robots meta changes). You can choose to split them out into separate tasks or make one task to track both. You could also choose to add more filtering if you want this task just to tack specific segments or subfolders.
Create as separate tasks
Task 1
| Report: | Broken Pages with Traffic |
| Filters: | Search Console Clicks GREATER THAN 50 Search Console Imp. GREATER THAN 500 |
Task 2
| Report: | Non-indexable Pages with Traffic |
| Filters: | Noindex EQUALs True Search Console Clicks GREATER THAN 50 Search Console Imp. GREATER THAN 500 |
Create as one task
| Report: | Pages in Search Console |
| Filters: | Noindex EQUALs True Search Console Clicks GREATER THAN 50 Search Console Imp. GREATER THAN 500 OR HTTP Status Code EQUALs 404 Search Console Clicks GREATER THAN 50 Search Console Imp. GREATER THAN 500 |
