Want to know how you measure up to the online competition?
The simple way to get the lowdown on how you are performing online is SimilarWeb, though there are other similar websites available. Similarweb is arguably the simplest to use on a free basis as a first step into comparative analytics.
From how many visitors the site is getting, through traffic sources and even data on keywords and gender splits, Similarweb gives you lots of useful information to help you make informed decisions.
The only drawback is if your competitor (or your website if comparing) need to have enough traffic to generate data. If it’s not showing up, then you’ve got one answer already.
At a top level you are able to compare visitor numbers, but alongside that visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate. In the graphic below comparing British Tabloid Newspaper websites, it’s clear that The Daily Mail is delivering nearly 3x the number of visitors of The Sun. Not only that these visitors are far more engaged, spending twice as long on the site and visiting 3x as many pages (so as an advertiser it’s clear whose website is the more successful).
If you dig a bit deeper, you can see the traffic sources driving these visits. In the case of our two examples then their cost of driving traffic is low as the majority comes from Organic Search, with a large proportion also going directly to their sites. Social Media is the third largest traffic driver.
The larger proportion of direct visitors for The Daily Mail links with the higher engagement level. This suggests a higher level of regular readers who browse the site regularly, whilst the Sun relies more on people searching for specific news stories and clicking on links within search engines.
Similarweb now digs down to show you top referring websites and even the top advertiser destinations (spoiler alert - Amazon does well out of The Daily Mail).
Another useful statistic is the device split, showing the split between mobile and desktop traffic. With the world going more and more mobile then having a decent proportion of mobile traffic is important. Interestingly we see that The Daily Mail has a fairly even split, whereas The Sun is mobile dominated. This probably reflects and older demographic amongst users of the Daily Mail?
If we look at Social Traffic, then The Sun receives far more referrals from Facebook which is likely to be driving that greater mobile usage too.
A few final niceties.
Similarweb now gives us a split of display advertisers traffic share, where we see The Daily Mail outperforming The Sun across all categories except Finance and Loans (I’m guessing it’s the loans driving that maybe?).
The other really useful addition is visitor crossover. This might help you understand how many of your visitors also visit your competitors. This can help us understand loyalty and how effective we are at giving the solution our visitors are looking for.
By comparing our website to competitors we’re not just able to understand areas for improvement in our own Digital Activity as well as where we are beating our competition but also to get a better idea on market sizing and potential too to build future plans and investment cases.
See if you're winning your fights by visiting Similarweb - just click here