Finding Competitors’ Analytics Reports

Knowing where your competitors get their traffic from can be very useful for increasing your own traffic, thanks to Google and Google Analytics we can find this very information. In Google Analytics there is an option to export as pdf, and many people use this option, and then upload the report to their web hosting. Luckily for us Google also manages to index some of these reports, so using a search query such as filetype:pdf intitle:dashboard “referring sites” “keywords” will return roughly 1000 Google Analytics reports for various websites.

Analytics reports don’t do us much good unless they are for websites in a similar niche, so add a keyword to the end of that search to find more targeted reports, but make sure it’s not a too specific niche. Something broad like filetype:pdf intitle:dashboard “referring sites” “keywords” games is suitable. The previous search returns 6 results, of those I only read the reports of websites with lots of traffic which for this search is only two websites, and one of them is irrelevant.

With these reports you should note their most successful keywords and best referring sites. Does anybody else have any ideas for discovering competitors’ traffic sources other than Analytics and Awstats?