How to legally spy the number of user registrants of competing services

ByAlan Levine

For those who operate some type of service, the number of user registrants of competing services is one of the concerns. Meanwhile, "how to legally spy" the number of user registrants of competing sites,ZoomShiftofBen Bad RingHas compiled it.

How-to Spy on Competitor Signups - The Flux - Medium
https://medium.com/the-flux/bb60dd92e41e


Mr. Bartring checks how many registrants of the service he / she operates everyday, which is an easy task in just a few minutes, but an indispensable act to increase income It is said that. Mr. Bartring notes how many new users are registered as members and how much active users exist, and these are indicators such as "to convert users to users who use paid services" It is going to be.

At the same time, Mr. Bartling's interest has been "How many competitors have acquired the number of registrants?" If I know the number of registrants, I understand that they are very interested because they can understand the revenue growth rate of rival companies and whether marketing efforts are fulfilled. However, there is no way to know the number of registrants other than hacking analysis tools for competing services if you think common sense. In such a case, Mr. Bartring went without any illegal actsSaaSIt seems he came up with a way to know the number of registrants.

In order to ascertain whether the number of registrants can be actually estimated by Mr. Bartling in a way that I thought, "Zendesk"Desk"GrooveActually measured the number of registrants of the service such as.

◆ How to legally spy the number of registered users of competing sites
Most SaaS applicationsRelational databaseIt can safely be said that it is built on. And the relational database has a calculation table to show the registrant of the account. In addition, this calculation table has a unique ID for each column, and it is always automaticIncrementSo, if the user who registered as a new member is a unique ID "# 450", the next member seems to be "# 451". In other words, if you create two accounts, you can know the number of newly registered users during the interval, a way to legally spy the number of user registrants of competing sites that Mr. Bartring came up with.

There are many ways to know the unique ID of the user account, but Mr. Bartring introduces two methods that can successfully extract the ID with many SaaS applications. The first is "How to check HTTP requests using the browser inspector". For example, in the case of Groove, when updating the company profile ID is returned in the payload. So you can easily check the ID by checking the payload data using the inspector.

Clicking on the image will play the GIF animation and you will see how to check the account ID using the browser inspector.


Another way is that you can use it if you can not see the account ID from the request payload and check "Third party request". This seems to be a method derived from the point that "all SaaS applications are operating at least some analysis tools", and by checking the account ID being sent to those analysis services, ID It is a way to know. For example, if a user does something with ZenDesk, ID informationHeapIt will be sent to the analysis tool. The user seems to be able to easily check this ID information by a method like the following image (played by clicking).


After leaving a period for a while, create a new account and check the ID to know the number of newly registered users during that period. In addition, Mr. Bartring commented that "I will spare at least one week in order to improve the accuracy of the data".

The result
The result obtained by Mr. Bartring 's measurement of the number of registered users in the above method with a period of 8. 625 days being described in the following figure. The number obtained by subtracting the number of "Signup 1" from "Signup 2" is the number of newly registered accounts during the measurement period, and by dividing this by the number of measurement days, it is possible to estimate how much user registration per day is.


Mr. Bartling's number of registered users is based on sales performance of SaaS and marketingKPIAlthough it is supposed to be, this is a criterion for estimating income to the last, it is also not all this. However, it is clear that the number of user registrants will be an indicator for cultivating marketing and income insights, and it is clear that more information can be obtained by analyzing data well. It is also an indicator to judge at least "which marketing strategy of competing services should be imitated," Bartring says.