Marketing Channels Overview

In this article

Understanding the traffic performance of your website and the websites in your competitive set across a variety of marketing channels is essential to building a winning marketing strategy.

Similarweb's fresh and reliable metrics cover a span of marketing channels and reveal the quantity and quality of traffic sent to a site(s) from a variety of sources.

What is the value?

The Marketing Channels overview page is packed full of valuable metrics and insights for each of the marketing channels. See what channels you are winning and where you may have opportunities to grow your traffic share, evaluate engagement and quality of traffic, and look for trends over time.

Using the insights:

Evaluate your website's performance with traffic volume and engagement metrics, such as visits, bounce rates, conversion rates, and more.
Get an overview of brand awareness by looking at direct and organic traffic sources and volumes.
Plan and prioritize marketing resources by analyzing the leading channels generating traffic for competitors and industry leaders.
View geographical market shares by setting the filters to narrow down to desired markets.
Evaluate PPC effectiveness by measuring CPC, CTR, quality scores, etc.

How to use Marketing Channels

To view the traffic performance of up to 5 websites, follow these steps:

Go to the Website Analysis module. Enter a website and navigate to the Marketing Channels page.
To target your analysis,
- Click +Compare to add up to four additional sites.
- Use the filters in the upper right to set the time period, country, and type of traffic (desktop, mobile web, or all traffic) that you would like to analyze.

For a deeper dive into each channel, click the link to each channel in the overview graph.

Traffic/Device Source

By default, you will be shown the ‘All Traffic’ view which is both Desktop and Mobile traffic combined - giving you an aggregated view of all traffic across marketing channels.

You can drill down into just Desktop traffic or just Mobile traffic to understand which marketing channels are more prominent in driving traffic for the selected domains. Just select from the device filter dropdown.

With the Channels Overview tools you can discover the leading channels generating traffic to a website or group of websites.

Key metrics & insights:

Direct: Traffic from users directly entering the URL, using a bookmark or saved link, etc.
Email: Traffic sent from web-based email clients such as gmail.com.

Note

We are able to categorize email traffic when it comes from the URL of a web-based email client. So, if the referring domain is gmail.com, we would categorize that visit as email traffic.
Referrals: Referral traffic includes traffic coming to a site through affiliates, links, content partners, and traffic from direct media buying or news coverage.
Social: Traffic sent from social media sites, such as Facebook or Reddit.
Organic Search: Refers to the search results of a search engine that cannot be influenced by paid advertising. Is the site well-optimized for SEO? When there’s a correlation with direct traffic, it indicates strong brand awareness as many organic visits are generated by branded terms.
Paid Search: Website that generates a large amount of traffic from paid search is spending advertising budgets on increasing brand awareness or targeting relevant audiences for specific products.
Display Ads: Traffic sent from other domains via a known ad-serving platform (i.e., Doubleclick, Taboola).

Notes:

Along with absolute numbers, look at percentages to understand the volume and proportion of traffic driven by each channel. And, benchmark against the industry (category) to see channel traffic relative to the entire industry.

Similarweb's Marketing Mix uncovers the quantity and quality of traffic sent to a website per traffic channel.

The data includes a breakdown of each channels traffic visits, which are truncated to 10,000 results. When you analyze data over a long period of time for a website(s) with a lot of different traffic sources, a minor discrepancy in traffic may be observed (in these instances, it's smaller than 0.05%, much less than half a percent).

For more information about each traffic channel, visit Marketing Channels.

Marketing Channel Insights

Marketing Channel Insights offer quick and easy-to-digest insights on significant fluctuations and traffic trends in key marketing channels. The insights can be used as a starting point to begin analyzing traffic changes over time and drill deeper into those changes to understand the ‘why’ more.

You can also get at-a-glance insights into your competitors’ channel traffic performance.

For example, in Compare mode see whether a competitor has spiked or dropped on display traffic, or if referral traffic has been increasing over the previous month. See who's making significant moves amongst your competitive set to understand if there’s been any major investment or reduction in resources to a specific channel strategy, so you can make decisions on whether to adapt your own channel tactics accordingly.

Marketing Channel Insights allows users to:

Understand recent changes in acquisition channels to get actionable insights toward their own marketing strategy.
Stay informed of competitors’ acquisition strategy to ensure competitive advantage.
Often traffic volume on one channel overshadows all other channels, and it's difficult to gain real insights at a glance - this highlights significant channel movements without having to dig them out.

Notes:

Insights are calculated, and therefore only visible, for channels that exceed 50,000 visits for the whole time period.

Increase/decrease insights are qualified and displayed if the change is >10% month over month.

Trend insights are qualified by >5% growth/decline for the previous 3 consecutive months.

Channel Traffic and Engagements Insights

In Channel Traffic and Engagement, you can discover the quality of visitor traffic per channel.

Key metrics & insights:

Traffic Share: Estimated percentage of traffic sent to each of the analyzed domains (or pages) compared to the total website's traffic.
Avg. Visit Duration: Average duration of the visit in hours, minutes, and seconds. Longer visits may suggest that visitors interact more extensively with the website, which may mean they find it a rich source of relevant information and knowledge. The more time a visitor spends on the website, the more likely they are to convert. Note: This average includes bounced visits. For more information, see our Glossary.
Pages/Visit: Average pages per visit for the selected time period. Remember that for most sites, the goal is to keep users engaged, nurture their interest, and encourage them to take the next step - therefore the greater the Pages/Visit is the more engaged their audience is with their brand.
Bounce Rate: Percentage of visitors who enter a site and then leave after visiting only one page.

Traffic Sources Insights

In Traffic Sources, you can see distinct sources driving traffic to your site.

Key metrics & insights:

Traffic Source: Source that drove traffic to the analyzed website.
Source Type: Type of source that sent traffic (includes direct mail, referrals, social networks, search engines, and display ads).
Group Traffic Share: Percentage of traffic sent to the category.
Group Share Split: Percentage breakdown of traffic sent to the analyzed websites.
Category: Category best describing the traffic source domain, such as search engines, fashion, and apparel, etc.

Notes:

Similarweb is the only platform that provides an accurate view of mobile web traffic across organic and paid search channels.

Data is available from Aug 2018 at a monthly granularity.

Period over Period Comparisons

All Marketing Channel graphs are now supported with Period over Period analysis.

This will allow you to see period over period growth/decline of your Competitor’s Marketing channels in terms of a percentage and will clearly indicate which player is growing in which channel and who is leading and point towards where there has been more resource or investment made in a particular channel by those competitors.

You will be able to select the desired period to compare against based on your requirements: month over month, quarter over quarter, specific periods, or year over year.

As well as the above, the period over period analysis allows you to:

See changes in average growth per channel for an industry.
Show traffic sources that are new for the latest period, traffic sources that are no longer being leveraged, traffic sources that have grown/dropped but are still sending traffic for both periods
See growth/decline in absolute numbers and in growth % for engagement metrics per channel.

Now you should be ready to analyze your competitors, Marketing Mix!

Read our blog post on The Most Effective Marketing Channels for Your Business to learn more, or visit Similarweb to get started!

For more information on Mobile Web Marketing Channels, see Mobile Marketing Channels Analysis.

FAQs

Why does Similarweb show higher direct traffic numbers than my direct measurement?

The direct traffic marketing channel serves as a bucket for referrals that we cannot identify. Similarweb attributes the traffic channel based on what the browser detects. For example, if a user accesses email via an email client (e.g. Outlook), then as far as the browser is concerned, the browser is opened and immediately jumps to a site, thus a direct visit. If, however, that user comes from Gmail.com, Similarweb attributes this traffic as mail.

What constitutes “Other Sources” in Marketing Channels?

"Other Sources" can refer to any of the Marketing Channels. Essentially it is a compilation of the data from the other channels that is over our maximum (1,000 sites) that gets truncated for the specific channel.

For example: If a site has over 1000+ referrers then the data from the 1,001st site and on will be classified as “Other Sources.” Please note that “Other Sources” can be an aggregation of traffic from multiple sources if several of the channels pass the threshold.

Feature Location

Try it now! Website Analysis > Enter a website and go to Marketing Channels.

Marketing Channels Overview

What is the value?

How to use Marketing Channels

Traffic/Device Source