How can I obtain analytics and social data for a site that I'm not authorized on?
-
I'd like to get traffic information and facebook /twitter stats for a company. Don't know their ua, logins or have access to any of their pages. Where can I find this information?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-
You can get some of what you want, but most will be safely locked behind a login and therefore as difficult to access as it would be illegal! Depending on how busy the competitor site is this might be enough to get a good flavour:
Facebook : For fan numbers just check them out on facebook, which will give you an instant impression of how active they are there. For share/like metrics you can use opensiteexplorer.org (Pro members only though I think), although that is on a per URL basis rather than sitewide.
For Twitter you can again get their follower numbers just by visiting their profile and the share data for any URL though OSE or other tools (I quite like Raven for this).
For both of the above the OSE data based on the home page and a couple of sample URLs might be enough. If you don't mind a bit of coding you can also get this data from the APIs directly.
For analytics data you can find the UA number easy enough - it is there in plain text in the source code of every page. However by itself it is not useful at all and certainly won't give you access to someone elses data.
You best bet for that is to use one of the sampling services - or better still more than one! These use a sample of user data to give an indication of likely metrics. Do though bear in mind that they are all wrong! Compare them with your own site data and you will see that they are all wildly inaccurate. However they are still better than a blind guess and the busier the target site the more accurate they tend to be. Some useful places to look for this are (in no particular order)
- http://www.spyfu.com/
- http://www.alexa.com/
- http://www.semrush.com/
- http://www.google.com/adplanner/
There are others, but that should get you started.
-
Quite simply, you can't access someone else's analytics data. Well, not without their username and password, or an extremely talented hacker, at least.
There are a few ways (think Alexa) you can estimate traffic - some of them are better than the rest, but all of them are imperfect. When you compare a website to another and use these metrics in a relative sense, however, they can be useful. Try looking up the estimated search volume of a competitors' brand names compared to your brand name using the Google Keyword Tool. This won't give you an accurate traffic estimate, but it might just help you figure out who's getting the most traffic and where your website falls in the market.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why would a newly created site, have ranked ahead of our site for keyword that we are optimized for?
This newly created site has a DA of 1 and PA of 1, no backlinks, no optimized urls, the keyword they ranked better than us on was listed a total of 6 times on the homepage. Our PA is 29 and DA is 18 for the page that ranks for this keyword. They really copied a few elements of our site but made sure to change a few things, but also list at the bottom of their site 5 keywords that are crucial to our niche industry but they're all linking to the same page. Any ideas? It's an SEO guy running the site, we've watched them toy with adwords trying to be number 1, but not liking the price, so they are here and there with it. Mainly I don't see why they'd rank better for this keyword, we our site have prolly 500% more content that's both of quality and relevance to our customers, in the form of Pdfs, infographics, help sections, and video. Very baffled here, any advice would rock!
Competitive Research | | Deacyde1 -
How can I track relevant websites my visitors are viewing?
I'm wanting to build a in-depth profile for my company's typical site visitor and I was wondering if there is anyway to view other websites that visitors are searching for online to get an idea of their hobbies/interests and how they spend their free time. I'm not sure if I'm asking the right questions in Google because the results are very broad and are more about reading analytics for your own company. Can anyone point me to a website or software that allows for this sort of thing?
Competitive Research | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Why has my authority article gone from P1 to below the top 50? Along with the rest of my site...
My site has run into some serious and unexplained SEO issues over the last 6 months, i.e: I wrote the content at http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/flat-roof-insulation/ about 3-4 years ago, and ever since it's competed for position with the huge PLC websites and hovered around the top 3 spots in google.co.uk. However, since May this year things have declined rapidly and now isn't even in the top 50 for [flat roof insulation]! Why?? I am aware that this content has been pretty heavily plagiarised since day 1, with some other sites making the effort the 'rehash' my wording and others just blatantly copying. At the same time it's also been relatively well linked to (for a very boring subject) since day 1. Over the same period (since May) the site has suffered a huge decline in traffic and rankings, as can be seen here http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Capture.png, but I find the huge drop harder to justify for a relevant article than for the homepage/site in general. What strikes me about the above is the two step changes in traffic volume; one in early June and the other in late October. I am vaguely aware of the penguin update etc, but it seems to me like I've been manually banished somehow? Thanks in advance for any advice!
Competitive Research | | Biota0 -
How can I do competitor mobile website analysis?
How can I do a competitor mobile website analysis? I am having troubles finding competitor tools for mobile sites.
Competitive Research | | seoflorida0 -
What is a desirable range for a keyword's difficulty rating?
Hi all! I am new to the world of SEO and just getting started. As I am doing keyword research I am consistently finding difficulty ratings in the 40%-50% range. Is this considered a "par" rating or should I be looking for "a longer tail" rating? Thanks
Competitive Research | | jclayton180 -
Confused about sites ranking when compared to each other
I'm looking at the keyword "snow guards" for two competitor websites: snogem dot com (SG) snoshield dot com (SS) I've been watching these two for about 4 months. SG stays in the top 5 SERPs consistently, while SS bounces around from 15-20 on Google. I've looked at the competitive link comparison and SS appears to have a much better link profile when it comes to DA. Page specific metrics in OSE show SS with a higher mozrank, moztrust, internal followed links, linking root domains, total linking root domains, and linking C Blocks. It appears to me that SG has many more links, but their links seem to be many site wide exact match keyword links, and paid for advertisements on a major site in the metal roofing industry. Honestly the linking profile of SG surprises me that they rank so much higher than SS after the Panda/Penguin updates. I have two questions: 1. When competing against these sites, should I model SG's link profile? I'm nervous to because of my previous statement thinking they will get hit with Panda/Penguin like updates. 2. What would it take to bounce SS to competing with SG on the first page? Is the number of links the only thing this site is missing, or is there something else to focus on.
Competitive Research | | kadesmith0 -
What is the best tool to monitor your competitor's backlinks?
I am looking for a tool that not only accurately tells me how many links are being built by a competitor, I want to know the specific URLs for specific periods. If I can filter/search by time periods, i.e which links were added for the month of August, 2012, that would be great. Thanks for the help.
Competitive Research | | inhouseseo0 -
Site redirect
Hi, Our site www.suncamp.nl has, for language reasons, 2 redirects So : www.suncamp.nl is redirected with a 301 to www.suncamp.nl/nl/nl and is than redirected 301 to http://www.suncamp.nl/nl/nl/home/uc19-l1-n804/ My question is; is this bad for our SEO? Recently we've been doing a lot of linkbuilding and SEO copywriting, but in comparison with our competitors were lagging behind. So I'm looking for other bottlenecks. Kind regards, Dennis Overbeek My email: dennis@acsi.eu ACSI
Competitive Research | | SEO_ACSI0