USE CASE:
Analytics companies: the honest take on page discovery
Read this if you need page discovery for analytics companies and you would rather see the real options than a pitch. Mamba Labs writes Apify actors for work like this, and Page Finder Extractor is the one that reads analytics companies.
The problem
Analytics companies and page discovery: the answer is public, scattered, and nobody has time to collect it. Analytics companies are bought by whoever lost the last argument about numbers, which shapes page discovery. What catches people out on analytics companies, page discovery included: the tool on the marketing site is rarely the tool the data team actually runs. There is 1 runnable example of page discovery for analytics companies below.
How we would run it
- Start with one of analytics companies you already know, so a wrong page discovery answer is obvious rather than plausible.
- Run Page Finder Extractor across your list of analytics companies, which carries 1 ready made setup for page discovery.
- Read ten rows of page discovery on analytics companies by hand before you trust the rest of the list.
Traditional Search Tools
- Job adverts, for analytics companies. Free, and a data engineering advert names the real stack in the requirements list.
- Google with a site operator. Free and precise. Fine for twenty companies, and rate limited into uselessness past that.
- Screaming Frog. Crawls a whole site and finds every page matching a pattern. Built for one site at a time rather than a list of hundreds.
- Guessing the URL. Try slash pricing. It works surprisingly often and fails silently, which is the problem.
- Search the site. A site search in Google with the term you want gets you there in one query per company. Reliable, and it is still one query per company.
Preconfigured tasks
A task is one of these actors with the inputs already filled in for a specific version of this job. Open one, swap in your own list, and run it without setting anything up from scratch.