Benchmark your website against your industry and your competitors to determine your position in the market, and to discover new opportunities for growth.
In this article, we'll cover how you can measure your digital performance and, from there, how you can improve that performance with data-driven tactics.
We’ll show you how to use Similarweb to:
Monitor the overall traffic changes in your market to see how your site performs compared to your competitors by using by Traffic Share.
We recommend monitoring your overall traffic share on an ongoing basis to track the efficacy of your marketing activities and to flag potential threats.
-
Go to Web Industry Analysis to analyze an industry.
You can select a predefined industry from the list or create a custom industry to include domains that are specific to your business.
-
Navigate to the Industry Trends page and view the traffic share graph.
-
Scroll down to the Domain Table to view Domains by descending order of Traffic Share.
Note: If your site doesn't automatically populate in the Top Ten, you can manually select your site from the Domain Table.
Analyze Key Insights:
Evaluate how your website compares to competitors in the key areas: % Change and Monthly Visits. What is the industry average and how are you performing relative to that average?
-
Hover your cursor over the graph to view traffic share data over time as compared to your competitors.
-
Toggle between % and # to analyze changes in traffic share and volume for the top websites in the category.
-
Focus your analysis on specific countries and time periods by using the settings bar at the top-right of the screen.
To identify up-and-coming threats in your market, try sorting the domain table by % Change to see who had the greatest month-over-month increase. Then, investigate further into this activity by going to Website Analysis ->Marketing Channels.
Benchmarking against the quantity and quality of your competitors' website traffic is critical when determining how effective your marketing tactics are. This analysis helps you assess your growth potential, areas for improvement, and competitor strengths.
-
In the Website Analysis module, enter the website domain to be analyzed. Add up to four competitor domains for analysis using the Compare button.
-
Navigation to Traffic and Engagement to view key performance indicators over time.
Analyze Key Insights:
-
Understand your competitors' reach by looking at Total Visits
-
Engagement table provides an at-a-glance comparison of traffic metrics like Visits / Unique Visitors and Visit Duration.
-
Use the traffic and engagement metrics to assess the quality of traffic by toggling through the views: Pages Per Visit, Avg. Visit Duration and Bounce Rates
-
Change the time period and target country to learn about the benchmark in a certain season or in a particular target market.
Looking at the graphs, try to identify where there is a change in a certain metric and take the opportunity to optimize. For most sites, the goal is to keep users engaged, nurture their interest, and encourage them to take the next step. The higher the number of page views and time spent on site, the more likely it is that users are highly engaged and willing to explore.
Pinpoint what's driving traffic and engagement changes for your competitors by analyzing their performance over time. See how their business is growing as compared to yours with a year-over-year analysis, and synthesize key insights like Growth Rate and Rank.
-
In the Traffic and Engagement page, remove all competitor sites and display only the metrics for your site.
-
Select your relevant Timeframe and then check Compare to Previous Year. Select apply to view the side-by-side comparison.
Analyze Key Insights
-
View Total Visits to see the relative change in online traffic.
-
Scroll down to the Traffic and Engagement graph to compare month-by-month data across your comparative time period for metrics like Monthly Visits and Visit Duration
Tips for getting more out of your analysis:
* Add an annotation to record and share your comments with your organization.
* Connect your Google Analytics account to see your own data in the Traffic and Engagement graph (privately).
* Toggle between line chart and bar chart to get a different view into month-over-month data
Analyze marketing channel traffic across your competitive set to optimize your marketing strategy. By comparing your performance against the industry, you can understand exactly where your competitors' strengths are and identify opportunities for growth.
Find out where your digital performance weaknesses are and which channels have the greatest potential to generate high-quality traffic.
-
Navigate to the Marketing Channels page. If competitors are not already selected, click Compare to add up to four additional sites for analysis.
-
View the Channels Overview module to see the traffic distribution of marketing channels across your competitive set.
-
Use the Benchmark feature to compare the analyzed sites against a pre-populated or custom industry.
In the graph, look for key areas of difference between the grey bar (industry traffic) and analyzed sites to identify the channels with the greatest potential for growth.
-
Next, scroll down to Channel Traffic and Engagement to view channel-by-channel insights. Start with Traffic to view the quantity of visits, and toggle across Visit Duration, Pages / Visit, and Bounce Rate to gauge quality of visits.
Analyze Key Insights:
-
Start with analyzing Traffic gaps, view the number of visits, and toggle across Visit Duration, Pages / Visit, and Bounce Rate to gauge quality of visits.
-
Use this data to determine:
Which channels are driving the most traffic?
Which site (primary or competitor) is winning by channel?
How does traffic change by channel, month-over-month?
To learn more about how you can benchmark your website's performance against competitors, check out our blog post on: "How to Use Similarweb for Competitive Benchmarking."
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.