Free competitor statistics!
Sometimes, while going through results for certain keywords, you will find that some of your competitors use free statistics programs. In a lot of cases, you can access those statistics, which usually contain very valuable data like keywords and referrers. Sometimes people will hide the usually obliged buttons for these scripts, but you can find them in the source code.
While working on the Mint Greasemonkey script, i thought it would be cool to add way more statistics programs into this script, and make them report all at once, and make the announcement point to those free statistics when they're there. I've been working on this, and am very proud to give you version 1.0 of the Statistics Detector GreaseMonkey script.
If you have new statistics packets which you want to add to this script, let me know, and I'll add them.
[tags]SEO, GreaseMonkey, Firefox, webstats, statistics[/tags]
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Do you have a list of the statistics programs that this checks for?
not yet, but i could compile one.
Cool,
Aww man, one of my secrets are now out! I just saw this on SEOmoz, really cool. It has always suprised me how many people do not secure their stats, especially if they use webalizer. Actually I would do this manually by checking for common stats url structures. Now I have a tool to do it.
Hehe Natasha, glad you like it, i'll be improving on it in the coming days :)
Sorry to be such a newb, but I installed greasmonkey so I could try this, then install your scrip, but then what do I do to see the competitor's stats?
Joe
just visit any website that you know has tracking (like this one) and you will see a small message popup in the upper left hand corner of the page area like "Google Analytics Enabled" or "Mint Enabled". Try it here: http://www.newsvine.com/
Now for my newb question - so what just because I know it's enabled, how to get see the keyword information?
Hey Joe, i'm planning on adding a way for mint to, so you can click on the small popup text, and it will move you to the mint directory. If that is in demo mode, you would then see the statistics for that site, probably including keyword info. This is already how it works for the free statistics programs it recognizes.
Very cool - I look forward to that. So do you have any tips on manually navigating to this keyword information? For instance, how would I get to the Google Analytics keyword information on a site once I know it's running it?
Thanks!
Ha, nice script! Sort of "Distant Early Warning" ;-)
Joe: fixed it. If you install the new version, you will be able to click on the Mint warning.
That would be nice if you detect the "phpmyvisites" free software GPL
it's a nice piece of software and really powerful
http://www.phpmyvisites.us
Ey Pascal, I updated it to do that :) thx for the tip!
I've updated the script again, it now captures Omniture and Sitestat as well.
Thanks for the update Joost. Another good one that I see often is AWStats. Its pretty good and I suspect that its easy to detect as well.
No it's not... It's based on log files, and doesn't use javascript, so that makes it kinda hard...
Correction, it can be found :) I added it, and reworked the entire script a bit to make it easier to add new engines. It's also gotten it's own page: Greasemonkey statistics detector.
Seen this tool before?
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/web-analytics-resources.asp
NL: Heb je deze tool ook al eens gezien? Ook leuk!
Ik bedoelde deze link:
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/vendor_discovery_tool.asp
Please add Coremetrics
Zohe: Check, working on that! (and you've been subscribed ;) )
Joost,
Thanks for quick response, is there any way to view the data for the non-free stats providers like
Omniture, Coremetrics etc?
And free Google Analytics?
How do you view the stats for other providers?
or can you not view stats at all?
Z
You can only see stats for providers that give these openly, there's no hacking or whatsoever involved. It's very useful sometimes to know what package people are using though :)
yes it is very useful! :-)
Thx :)
Hey! I tried installing this script but it doesnt work.....