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Industry Marketing Channels

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Understanding the digital traffic of an industry set across a variety of 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 sites from a variety of channels.

What is the Value?

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

How to Use Industry Marketing Channels

Within Industry Research > Web Industry Analysis, you can view the traffic performance of an industry or a custom industry.

Using the filters in the upper right, select the period of time for your data, the country, and the type of traffic you would like to analyze (Desktop, Mobile Web, or All Traffic).

Notes: 

  • You can add more sites to your industry.

  • If available, mark the Compare to checkbox to compare either the previous year or previous period.

  • The country options depend on your Similarweb package.

  • Some metrics are only available for desktop traffic.

Traffic Share

In Channels Overview, you can discover the leading channels generating traffic for each site.

In the graph, you can see:

  • Direct: Traffic from users directly entering the URL, using a bookmark or saved link, etc. Direct traffic can be used as a barometer for brand strength (awareness and demand).

  • Email: Website that receives a large amount of traffic from email is likely to have a large loyal customer base that engages via an owned mailing list.

  • Referrals: Website that receives a large amount of traffic from referrals is likely to have a strong affiliate strategy or enjoy significant media coverage.

  • Social: A website that generates high and consistent traffic from social networks is likely to have a loyal community of users. Note: Traffic from Facebook, via the Facebook Ad Network, is tracked as social traffic.

  • 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, you can look at percentages to understand the volume and proportion of traffic driven by each channel. In addition, you can benchmark to the category to see marketing strategies relative to the entire industry.

  • Similarweb's Marketing Mix enables you to uncover the quantity and quality of traffic sent to a brand per traffic channel. The data includes a breakdown of each specific traffic source's 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).

Traffic Volumes by Source

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

In the table, you can see:

  • 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:

  • Organic & paid search are combined to Search.

  • 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 out! Web Industry Analysis > Enter an industry and click on the Marketing Channels page.

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