It’s easy to find out data about your own website traffic. You can use Google Analytics, plugins for your CMS, services like Hotjar, Clicky, Mixpanel and others. Choose a convenient option for you and use. But how to know the traffic of someone else’s site? How to study your competitors and find ways to bypass them? And why do you need to know how much traffic other companies in your niche get? These are the questions we want to answer today.

Why track website traffic statistics

It is important to realize that your business, as well as your website, is not in a “vacuum”. Today, there are no niches left in the world in which there would be no competition. Therefore, if you want to compete effectively, you should know not only your audience, but also other market players.

Analyzing other people’s website traffic is an important component of successful web resource management and development. Here are just a few reasons why it is necessary:

• Content Optimization. Identifying the most visited pages helps you better understand what kind of content is interesting and relevant to your potential customers. And this gives you the opportunity to adjust your content strategy and work more efficiently. Plus in this way you can identify “exit points” where visitors leave the site, and eliminate them.
• Improving the promotion strategy. Statistics data helps you test different variants of pages, UX/UI design, calls to action, etc. Again, you can analyze competitors, borrow successful ideas and avoid their mistakes when creating and implementing a promotion strategy.
• Increasing conversions. Analysis of other people’s site traffic and conversions helps to objectively assess the effectiveness of the web resource and, again, use the most successful solutions in your favor.
• Search for ideas for development. Analyzing the pages that attract the most traffic from competitors can provide ideas for improving or creating new content. And understanding what features or design elements work well for others can help you improve your own site.
• General market analysis. Information about popular products, themes, and competitor pages helps you objectively assess the market. And with in-depth analysis, you can also analyze traffic seasonality and fluctuations, which helps you more accurately forecast demand and plan marketing campaigns.

In addition to all of the above, traffic statistics for other people’s websites can be useful for identifying existing problems. You will be able to find out in which sections your competitors are losing traffic and which elements of their strategy are not working properly. Which means you learn from other people’s mistakes instead of learning from your own. Isn’t that a good reason?

Generating a list of competitors

The first and perhaps most important step in this stage is to research your market and niche as accurately as possible. Determine what area and market segment you operate in. This can be geographic region, type of product or service, price range, etc. You also need to define your positioning – your unique value proposition – to understand who you are competing with for your customers’ attention.

Once you have accurately defined your market and niche, you can start building a list of competitors. This can be done in many different ways, but we recommend combining them:

1. Use search engines. The easiest way is to use relevant keywords related to your business or product. Search for them on Google (or another search engine) to see which of your competitors are currently at the top of the results.
2. Examine advertising activity. See who is advertising similar products or services to get an even better idea of your direct competitors. It’s also helpful to analyze social media advertising to see who is targeting the same audience.
3. Analyze links and mentions. Many tools, such as Ahrefs, allow you to find out which sites are linking to competitors and thus identify the major players in your niche. You can use Google Alerts or Mention to track brand mentions.

Additionally, you can survey your own customers to find out what companies they are still considering, what they like and what they don’t like about them. Attending industry events and conferences, if they are held in your region or if you are willing to attend them in another city, can also be very useful. Here you can not only identify competitors, but also get a lot of valuable insider information that will help you develop your own business more effectively.

We would like to give some more useful tips:

1. Segment your competitors

We recommend dividing them into three categories:

• direct competitors – those that offer the same or similar products or services;
• indirect competitors – those that provide alternative solutions to the same needs or problems;
• potential competitors – those that have only recently emerged and may enter your market.

Naturally, the main focus should be on the first category. But it is also very useful to keep an eye on indirect and potential competitors.

2. Keep the list updated

Regularly check the market for new players in the niche or changes in the position of existing players. Keep an eye on trends in your industry that may affect the competitive landscape. Remember that the business sphere is changing very actively. If you don’t adapt to these changes in a timely manner, you risk losing ground to other companies. Keep your finger on the pulse and take note of any important changes.

How to know website traffic: 7 services

Although we have described above quite practical ways to analyze competitors, they do not provide a way to determine what kind of traffic a particular website has. The fact that a certain website is in the top of Google does not mean that it has a lot of visits. Conversely, being on the third, fifth or even tenth position does not indicate a low amount of traffic. For a more accurate analysis of attendance, we recommend using special services. We will talk about them below.

SimilarWeb

This is one of the world’s most popular services for analyzing traffic. SimilarWeb has more than 100 million sites in its database, and its crawlers have indexed more than 10 billion pages. With its help, you can:

• analyze the traffic of any public website;
• get data on advertising campaigns;
• analyze behavioral factors;
• find the words and phrases by which the site is found in search;
• determine the most effective traffic channels.

SimilarWeb has a free 7-day trial, and monthly subscriptions start at $125.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a functional service for SEO analysis and link profile research. With its help you can analyze the traffic and positions of the site. In terms of competitor analysis Ahrefs allows you to:

• Evaluate the effectiveness and volume of organic traffic;
• study the profile of backlinks;
• analyze the effectiveness of paid traffic;
• evaluate the structure of the website, etc.

Ahrefs subscriptions start at $129 per month, and if you pay for a year you get two months free.

SEMrush

SEMrush is quite a popular service among internet marketers with very convenient and informative graphs and statistics both on their own projects and on other people’s projects. With its help you can find out:

• the amount and approximate value of organic and paid traffic;
• the share of traffic attracted to the site by top keywords;
• the amount of traffic attracted with the help of paid tools.

A Pro subscription will cost you $139.95 per month.

Serpstat

The platform has a fairly extensive set of tools for SEO analysis, keyword analysis, contextual advertising and ads. Analyzing competitors’ sites with Serpstat will help you:

• find out approximate site traffic;
• monitor positions;
• track the seasonality of traffic, etc.

In general, Serpstat is more useful for analyzing your own site, but you can also use it to study competitors’ websites.

The cost of an individual subscription to Serpstat is $59 per month.

DataForSEO

A service from Ukrainian developers that provides a number of tools for analyzing your site and the sites of your competitors. With its help you can:

• track website ranking in search engines;
• analyze backlinks;
• Analyze keywords.

Importantly, DataForSEO stores data for a year, making it easier to track traffic and position dynamics over time. The cost of using DataForSEO depends on the services you are interested in. For example, you can

SpyFu

SpyFu is another handy, though not as well known service that provides a number of tools for SEO promotion tasks, including keyword analysis and researching major competitors.

With SpyFu you can:

• find out the share and approximate value of organic and paid traffic;
• find out the monthly number of visitors;
• View traffic dynamics for 6 months, a year, 2 years, 5 years or for the entire time of the site’s existence;
• view the amount of traffic by main keywords;
• see which pages bring the most traffic.

SpyFu’s basic plan costs from $33 per month for an annual fee.

SE Ranking

A popular tool for analyzing competitors, including studying the flow of users who come to a website. With SE Ranking you can find out:

• which keywords drive the most visitors;
• how much traffic advertising attracts;
• which pages have the highest number of clicks from search, etc.

The cost of a basic subscription to SE Ranking is $52 per month.

Comparative table of services

As you may have seen, there are many ways to analyze the traffic of someone else’s site and study your competitors in detail. By and large, it is not so important what methods and tools you use for this purpose. The main thing – be sure to conduct such an analysis if you want to not just be in the market, and effectively compete in your niche.

We hope the information was useful for you and you will be able to put it into practice. Good luck in business and promotion!