To provide you with the most accurate estimations for the digital world, we constantly review and fine-tune our algorithms. Occasionally, we need to go a step further due to major shifts in user behavior.
As web consumption continues to shift to mobile, Similarweb needs to understand how these users experience the digital world.
That’s why we’re releasing a brand new Mobile Web Algorithm between August 22 and August 31, 2022. Combined with new data sources, this new algorithm improves Similarweb’s accuracy across more sites, site sizes, and countries – while better reflecting mobile web trends.
This new algorithm comes after enormous R&D efforts to enhance our platform. It delivers the highest standards of benchmarking excellence to give you a complete and accurate view of the digital world.
Our data methodology uses a multidimensional approach to ensure that every data point we estimate is both reliable and representative of a site’s traffic and usage. To create a comprehensive view of the digital world, Similarweb relies on four primary sources:
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Direct Measurement Data
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Contributory Network
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Data Partnerships
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Public Data Sources
To learn more, visit Similarweb Data Methodology
Two factors behind our Mobile Web metric improvements:
New data sources
Our algorithm now takes in new data sources at a more granular level. Adding these sources enables us to make more accurate estimations for both trend and scale compared to our old algorithm.
A new algorithm
The larger driver of these changes is the algorithm itself. It can use and blend different data sources and has been trained to optimize for the best blend.
These upgrades help us provide you with estimations that are more representative of a site's traffic and usage when compared to our previous algorithm.
This release will impact every Similarweb solution, and any data pulled/obtained from our API, our free product, and our trial versions. Any metric that has a mobile web traffic component or a total traffic component (mobile web + desktop) will be impacted.
View the full list of impacted metrics:
All historical data in our platform will change upon the release of the new algorithm. We will rerun all of our data through the new algorithm to ensure a valid comparison.
However, you might notice inconsistencies in any places where you’ve taken data out of Similarweb and stored it in a data warehouse, data lake, or even a Google sheet.
It’s important to flag this, in case you're using our data for any internal analysis, decision-making, reporting, or other activity.
For those looking to better understand the impact of the new algorithm on their data there are two options:
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Visit our current traffic and engagement beta (in the traffic and engagement section of our platform). Here you can compare data from the new and current algorithms to understand what’s changed.
Note
As this is a beta, it is limited to only specific metrics within the traffic and engagement area of our platform.
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Pull the current mobile web metrics from our platform via our API before August 1, 2022. While it’s not possible to perform a comparison before the release, it will be a good point of reference for you once the new algorithm is available.
We know inconsistencies can cause extra work, but we promise the new algorithm is worth it.
While every site is different, we’ve improved the scale accuracy of sites of all sizes and from all countries, without sacrificing any trend accuracy.
To do this, we compared the estimations from our new algorithm to the direct measurements of several sites that share their data directly with us.
Not only did we confirm that the algorithm was more effective at the global level, we created cohorts to ensure the improvement occurred at every site because of the way this new algorithm blends and weights digital signals in order to create representative estimations. The mix of digital inputs for large sites in the US is different from the mix required to make accurate estimations for mid-sized sites in the UK.
The rollout is scheduled to occur between August 22 and August 31, 2022. If you’d like to save your current mobile web data, please pull it from the platform via our API (or through the “Download to Excel” feature) before August 22, 2022.
At Similarweb, we work every day to increase the breadth, depth, reliability, and accuracy of the digital insights you get from our platform. We promise this new algorithm is one step closer to giving you the perfect measure of the digital world.
Feel free to contact your account manager or our customer support team with any questions.
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