[KernelPanic]

They claim you can "see anyone's Google Analytics"
https://www.nachoanalytics.com

Thoughts?

[Mindtap]

I was on the launch call and bought an account. Going to do some work to verify accuracy, but here are my initial thoughts. https://mindtapmarketing.com/blog/access-any-sites-google-analytics/

[IvanDrago]

Even on their own website they admit they can't "track" any mobile traffic at all, which is an enormous chunk of data to miss out on if you're relying on these stats.

Interesting thread on Reddit too - https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comm...cho_analytics/

Quite clearly they aren't getting any data at all from actual Analytics accounts.

Whole thing seems patchy at best.

[KernelPanic]

Originally Posted by Mindtap

I was on the launch call and bought an account. Going to do some work to verify accuracy, but here are my initial thoughts.

Are you an affiliate?

[Mindtap]

No. Digital agency.

[tstolber]

Hmmm ... interesting. Several thoughts.
1) How? I would love to know
2) What about it is export controlled?
3) Seems like this skirts extremely close to many legal and ethical issues.

I'm wondering if they are back engineering or making several inferences from other data - seeing as the target site doesn't actually have to have Google Analytics I think that must be the case. They are just making the data be presented as if it was an analytics account.

I would love to learn more about this.

[Mindtap]

All good questions. They do (vaguely) discuss "how" here: (www.nachoanalytics.com/how-it-works) - and it appears that you're right. They are getting what they view as a representative sample from somewhere and extrapolating what they think is close to actual numbers from that, then they're just using GA as the reporting layer. From that I can draw a few conclusions:

1) while it's a sexy headline, it's a bit disingenuous to tout being able to view competitors' Google Analytics when it's actually viewing estimates using Google Analytics

2) I don't see why it would be illegal. As for ethics, I suppose it's as ethical as any competitive intelligence tool. I expect my competitors to use every legal tool at their disposal. But that's not to say that Google doesn't decide that they don't like being implicated in this and take some kind of action.

The remaining questions, then, are where the data comes from, and how good their system is at approximating the real thing.

There are certainly other sites that have done or do this type of thing (Alexa, Quantcast, etc.). Back in the day, Alexa used a downloadable toolbar to gather data, but I don't know if they still do or how they could get to a meaningful sample size by that method alone, so I'm assuming that NA is buying data from a source or sources that have cookied a whole bunch of browsers.

Determining accuracy will take some work, and it remains to be seen whether it will be worth anyone's while to undertake such an endeavor. I think it would be interesting and useful to do a deep dive, but I've also got an agency to run...

Oh, and I'm not sure what you mean by "export controlled."

[KernelPanic]

They use data from people who have opted in, like Alexa.

[tstolber]

I would guess they are using some kind of Neural Network from a fairly large data set of sites that are in their control and that they have access to. Some fringe cases (can't think of any of the top) would probably show the inaccuracies or efficiency of the model prediction.

[Mindtap]

So essentially it's SimilarWeb served up in Google Analytics.

[SebSEO]

Yeah basically getting data from the ISP level akin to SimilarWeb is my best guess

[matt1966]

Get the free trial and look at your own analytics?

[matt1966]

Yeah, I'd bet my life they're just using SimilarWeb's API's as they have traffic / engagement / to/from metrics. https://www.similarweb.com/corp/deve...gement_pro_api