Understand Market Traffic and Industry Trends

Knowing what your competitors are up to is vital to maintain the competitive edge. To take that knowledge a step further, Similarweb can provide you insight into what your entire market is doing, what’s trending, how it's performing, and who the key players are. 

In this guide, we'll show you how to use Similarweb to:

• Understand your position in the market landscape
• Discover the traffic leaders in your industry and the total reach potential
• Find the industry traffic trends, and well as who’s on the rise and who’s declining
• The top searches driving traffic in your industry

Step 1: Get an Overview of the Market Performance 

Within the Market Research module, start with Market Analysis. Select a predefined industry from the list or select a Custom Industry, either created by you or a another user on the account. Refer to the Market Overview guide for full instructions on how to set up this report.

The Market Overview gives you a bird's eye view of the audience size of your industry, key sizing indicators, traffic trends, and much more. Use the filters in the upper-right to adjust the data for a specific time period, within a geographic region, or by traffic type (all traffic, desktop, or mobile web).    

Metrics that Matter:

• Unique Visitors: the average number of individuals visiting the industry, within the country and time period analyzed. The YoY change is crucial in understanding if the industry is rising or falling in popularity.
• Unbounced Visits: under Key Sizing Indicators, this provides how many times a visit resulted in more than one page being explored (per site). 
• Monthly Visits: the total number of visits to this industry. Note that the number in the header tab is averaged over the months selected. 
• Market Difficulty: use this section to assess how difficult it is to compete in this market based on metrics such as: loyalty, branding, cost, and consolidation.

Step 2: Find the Market Leaders and Influencers

Navigate to the Players page to view the sites receiving the most traffic, and which sites are on the rise. (Conversely, you can see declining players as well.)

Click on the trend icon in the top right corner to convert the graph to a monthly traffic trend, broken out by the selected sites (which can be altered in the list to the right). Hover over the graph and move along the timeline to see growth or lost share of the market. Note any seasonality trends in the industry.

Step 3: Assess Key Metrics

Scroll down on the Players report for the Quadrant Analysis. It will provide you visibility into where and how the leaders in your market are winning.

• Learn from successful players.
• Report on your performance in the context of other players and the market.
• Increase revenue by identifying missed opportunities and successful marketing strategies.

Step 4: Understand the Voice of the User with Search Trends

Click to Demand Trends to find the top and trending search keywords in the industry. This sheds light onto audience interests and new and trending searches within the industry. Depending on the industry, it’s a great way to gauge what people are looking to read about or what they’re shopping for.