App Gives You Access to Any Site’s Google Analytics Data

UPDATE: after spending more time unpacking the technology behind Nacho Analytics, I published A Second Look at Nacho Analytics. I encourage you to read this post first, then move on to the follow-up.

On Tuesday competitive analytics company SpyFu demonstrated that they had figured out how to provide users with Google Analytics data for any website on the Internet.

In announcing the new standalone product, dubbed Nacho Analytics, SpyFu founder and CEO Mike Roberts touted it as “God mode for the Internet.” And my early tests show that he’s not being entirely hyperbolic.

Predictably, the site was completely bogged-down with traffic on launch day, so I wasn’t able to run any reports despite a number of attempts. But Wednesday morning everything worked smoothly on my first try, and within about five minutes I was viewing real-time data for MOZ.com.

Here’s what we know

While I have been able to verify that the basic functionality demonstrated on the call using sonos.com, eharmony.com, and basspro.com does, indeed, work; much of what I know at this point is based on information provided by Roberts and the SpyFu team, but I have no reason to believe that anything they’ve told me is misleading. So here are the high points:

• After logging in, the user enters a Gmail or Gsuite email address and the application initiates a new, fully-functional instance of Google Analytics under the associated account.
• The target site does not have to use Google Analytics and all reporting features and capabilities, including conversion data, are supported. However, the data is desktop only. That’s right, mobile data is not available.
• While it takes up to a week to ingest enough data to produce useful insights, the application builds the first week’s reporting using a mix of real-time data and past user patterns and presents it in about five minutes.
• In Nacho-land, “real-time” is actually an hour old, but that seems a minor detail in light of what the application is able to provide.
• According to Roberts, a fortunate consequence of the way the system works is a 48-50 percent reduction in the number of “not set” and “keyword unavailable” results in GA.

What’s it cost?

Introductory pricing is as follows:

• $39/mo for one website / 2 users, and $30 per additional site
• $79/mo for five websites / 10 users, and $20 per additional site
• $119 for 15 websites / 20 users, and $10 per additional site
• sites with a traffic rank from 101 to 5,000 are a flat $99/mo.
• if you’re interested in sites with a traffic rank from 1-100, you’ll have to contact sales for a quote.
• there’s a seven-day free trial before you’re charged, and the first month is fully refundable

What’s Next?

The number of greenfield opportunities that this technology could produce is both dizzying and exciting, and Roberts touched briefly on a few possibilities during the call, such as:

• identifying best-sellers through product-level e-commerce data
• revealing local, review-level insights from Yelp
• uncovering influencer metrics such as the biggest traffic drivers
• using sales data to inform investment decisions
• guiding product design decisions with behavioral metrics

He also said that weekly, expert-led webinars expanding on those concepts would start in about two weeks, and he encouraged those on the call to develop their own and reach out to him with their ideas.

Conclusion

This is all super exciting stuff. But as someone who recalls feeling a similar sense of giddiness over the possibilities of Klout and any number of failed Google products (Google Wave, anyone?), I’m not quite ready to declare that Nacho Analytics has completely changed the web analytics game, but I will say that all signs point in that direction.

My main concern is that for one reason or another, Google could render the offering useless with a simple tweak of their terms of service, API and/or other policy.

According to the team, the offering is completely compliant with Google’s TOS, and otherwise above-board legally, and I would imagine (hope) that it has been vetted and approved by Google, though I have yet to verify that. But what is certain at this point is that Team Nacho pulled off a technological feat that was almost unimaginable to most of us just 24 hours ago, and regardless of anything else, they deserve a huge amount of credit.