SimilarWeb is a powerful and elegant tool that businesses, digital marketers, and even individual bloggers can analyze their own website traffic and that of their competitors. I decided to review Similarweb now because of Alexa.com's upcoming “retirement” from Amazon on May 1st, 2022. I believe Similarweb is the closest thing to Alexa.com and the best alternative available right now.
An important note about Similarweb is that while it is a digital marketing tool, it is not an SEO tool per see. Similarweb is the perfect tool to overview your competitors' strategy, audience segmentation, and other vital traffic-related metrics.
On the other hand, I would not recommend a tool for keyword research, link-building opportunities, and even developing a PPC strategy. However, the data you can extract from Similarweb's large-scale analytics can help you refine the above strategies.
This is an overview of the areas Similarweb can make a difference for your business:
- Audience metrics
- Advertising & Affiliate marketing opportunities
- Brand recognition and performance
- Competitive analysis
- Customer behavior
- Keyword performance
- Lead generation and enrichment
- Market research
- Merges & Acquisitions: Sales and investment opportunities
- PPC
- Page performance
- Product optimization
- Sales engagement
- Website and app traffic analysis
Another note: Traffic data for a gaming website are not ideal for showcasing Similarweb's capabilities. At the same time, showcasing key strategic data in public would not be wise. Keep this in mind as you go through this review.
Finally, this is a comprehensive overview of Similarweb's features. Exhausting the tool's features would be impossible in a single blog post.
Who is Similarweb for?
Before we start, I think it's important to clear things out by answering whether Similarweb is a good fit for your business. If you work for a business looking to grow its traffic, tools like Semrush and Ahrefs are what you should be looking for.
Suppose you work for a business that has established traffic and is looking to optimize it, understand your audience, or expand by acquiring other online assets. In that case, Similarweb is the tool you should be looking at, so you are in the right place.
I view Similarweb as a tool ideal for SaaS, agencies, and enterprises. And, whenever someone from a large corporation reaches out to me with interest in acquiring BORDERPOLAR, they always mention the website's Similarweb reported traffic.
SimilarWeb Overview
Similarweb is a web analytics online platform founded in 2007 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Similarweb provides data from over 100 million websites globally and 4.7 million apps to help marketers and businesses monitor their and their competitors' performance on the web.
Additionally, Similarweb collects data from a panel of hundreds of millions of web users. According to some sources, Similarweb's panel is one of the most comprehensive on the market. SimilarWeb uses these collective internet activities with web crawlers, external providers, contributory networks, and public data sources to provide high-quality market intelligence.
Similarweb Plans & Pricing
Similarweb offers sets of different tools depending on your needs. Those include:
- Research Intelligence
- Digital Marketing Intelligence
- Sales Intelligence
- Investor Intelligence
You will have to contact Similarweb to receive a custom quote for the last two plans. Meanwhile, the Research Intelligence plan offers both a free and a premium tier:
- Research Intelligence Free Plan: This plan offers a limited range of features support for one user and limited access to historical website and app data.
- Research Intelligence Premium Plan: While the Research Intelligence plan also requires you to contact Similarweb, here is what the answer you will receive will typically be (as I have contacted them multiple times in the past).
- API access
- App analysis
- Audience analysis
- Company analysis
- Conversion analysis
- Excel export and dashboards
- Global and country-level data
- Industry analysis
- Multiple users
- Segments analysis
- Up to three years of historical data
Digital Marketing Intelligence: Three different pricing options are available monthly and annual. Going for the annual plan will save 16%:
- Essential: $249 per month (monthly plan) / $209 per month (annual plan) for a total of $2,510
- Advanced: $449 per month (montly plan) / $386 per month (annual plan) for a total of $4,525
- Ultimate: Custom pricing (you will have to contact Similarweb and request a quote)
Basic
Advanced
Ultimate
Custom
All plans provide access to:
- API access
- App analysis
- Audience analysis
- Company analysis
- Conversion analysis
- Excel export and dashboards
- Global and country-level data
- Industry analysis
- Multiple users
- Segments analysis
- Up to three years of historical data
What changes between different pricing tiers are the monthly limits on:
- Ad creatives
- Historical data
- Keyword results
- Website page results shown in any given reports
Payment methods: Mastercard, Visa, AMEX, and Discover.
Getting Started with Similarweb
The first thing you will have to do in Similarweb once your account creates a competitive arena. Once you enter the address of your primary website, you will be able to select your competitors. From there on, you will be able to take control and analyze your website and your industry's competition based on many metrics from Similarweb.
Once you set up your competitive arena, you can explore your Competitive Tracker (still in beta):
According to GA, BORDERPOLAR indeed suffered a minor decline in traffic in January (and a bigger one in February). While the percentage is not 100% accurate, it's pretty close to the truth, considering the fast-evolving pace of the gaming niche.
At the same time AFK. Guide's traffic spike is 100% accurate for the past week, but the answer you won't find in Similarweb relates to the question “what caused this traffic spike?” as the data is not there yet. Remember, the spike happened in February, but Similarweb's are one month old.
For instance, the latest organic pages have not been discovered yet:
Consequently, you will still have to rely on tools like Google Trends to understand traffic spikes associated with newly introduced keywords.
Now let's dig deeper into each data metric provided by the platform
Similarweb Data metrics Overview
The dashboard of SimilarWeb contains nine data metrics that measure multiple aspects of a website's performance while allowing comparisons between multiple websites in the same industry and outstanding visualizations, making it a perfect tool for online business analysts.
Website Performance
The Website Performance tab will display the rank of your website, estimated monthly visits and visitors, engagement stats, and more.
These rankings show the site's ranking in each category and its global, national, and industrial positions. The data is calculated based on the last three months. Similarweb has gone strides to improve the accuracy of its data, and most of the numbers here are very close to the real traffic of the analyzed website.
Similar Sites
“Similar Sites” is another very accurate tab showcasing other websites in the same industry, along with the affinity percentage between those websites and the analyzed one. The affinity percentages are not 100% accurate. For instance, AFK Arena-related websites should have a much higher affinity than general gaming blogs. What you can also see is whether a website uses Google Adsense.
Marketing Channels
The Marketing channels tab is among the most interesting in Similarweb, as you will find the latest trends for each channel; organic search, direct, and social.
Audience Breakdown
The Audience set of tabs in Similarweb is handy to understand your competitors' audience. While you have access to more accurate analytics (GA, Clarity, Yandex Metrika, or any other tool) for your business's website(s), understanding your competitors' audience will help you discover untapped potential and missed marketing opportunities.
Geography
The Geography tab shows where a site's traffic comes from and includes metrics like traffic share, country rank, visit duration, bounce rate, and pages/visits. As the screenshot above can tell you, even on a free trial of the basic version, you can only see the top 5 countries bringing the most traffic to a website.
Demographics
Audience Interests
Audience Interests can help you discover what other industries attract your audience's (or that of a competitor's) attention; you will find an industry distribution, a topic's distribution, and distribution of cross-visitation between domains. The last visualization can be extremely valuable for your website to understand traffic bleeds better and stop them.
Search
In this section, you will find the Organic Search performance, similar to Ahref's Organic Keywords and Semrush's Traffic Analysis.
Overview
Here you will find an overview of the search visits, organic vs. paid traffic, branded traffic, and a new Beta feature with monthly insights and trends.
Keywords
The Keywords tab contains all the information about a website's keyword rankings, traffic volume and share per keyword, CPC, monthly volume, SERP features, and Organic vs. Paid traffic share. SEO experts will notice the evident absence of a keyword difficulty column. Again, Similarweb is mostly about overall strategy rather than fine-grained SEO-related decisions. My instincts tell me that there will be much more SEO-actionable information in Similarweb's library in the future.
Organic Competitors
The Organic Competitors tab will help you discover keyword overlaps and keyword gaps and even discover potential transitive competitors for your own business based on the competitors of the analyzed website.
Social Overview
The Social Overview tab lists the top social networks sending referral traffic to the site. You will find the top 5 social sources of referral traffic and traffic distribution between them. Understanding your competitors' social media traffic flow can be valuable to help you identify where you should focus on your social media marketing efforts.
Display Advertising Overview
The Display tab lists the top publishers as well as ad networks. It displays the traffic generated for the analyzed website through display advertising, while you can also see the top publishers that bring traffic to the website through display advertising.
Monetization
Advertisers
If you are trying to understand a competitor's monetization strategies and what type of advertisers they attract, the Advertisers tab is what you are looking for. You will find the top advertisers in terms of outgoing ad visits and the estimation of the total outgoing ad visits pointing to them. You will also find the distribution of the top Advertising Networks distribution that run ads on the website. In this case, 100% of the ads run on the Google Display Network (managed by Mediavine).
The above information is just an overview of the available data in Similarweb, but there is a lot more!
Mobile App Analysis
SimilarWeb provides advanced analysis and in-depth insights into applications. The company has invested heavily in mobile to gain valuable insights into the performance of mobile applications. The platform primarily focuses on web traffic and mobile traffic, although some data collection apps are still in beta.
The mobile apps of companies can compare their applications using these complex metrics.
Comparing your performance with that of your competitors can assist you in determining their most popular categories and industries.
The Mobile App Analysis overview consists of the following elements:
- Ranking History (category rank, top countries rank, all-time rating, average monthly installs, and more)
- Daily Ranking
- Downloads & Installs
- Usage –User engagement and retention
- Audience demographics and interests
- Company Analysis
Who should use SimilarWeb?
You can use SimilarWeb's market information in many different ways. SimilarWeb's market intelligence is an excellent data source for optimization and research. Through its market intelligence, you can accurately estimate the size and performance of your company.
SimilarWeb for Marketers
Marketers must constantly analyze and compare their competitors to identify the most effective marketing strategies. SimilarWeb is much more than just a market analysis tool. SimilarWeb is more than a market analysis tool. It also provides information such as traffic-generating keywords or referral opportunities.
Competitive Insights
Similarweb provides a comprehensive overview of traffic and engagement across all marketing channels. You can also “copy” your competitors' strategies to speed up your company's growth by employing tactics that are already tested and battle-hardened.
You will be able to evaluate the marketing channels used by competitors and focus on the ones that bring the highest ROI.
Keyword overview and research
Keywords are entry points that help your business acquire more organic or paid traffic. It is easier to find keywords if they are more prominent than others. Similarweb will help you evaluate keywords that drive traffic to competitors and understand whether there is room for your business to satisfy the users' intent by targeting those keywords to increase conversions and generate more qualified leads.
Referral Sources
SimilarWeb is an excellent tool for businesses that rely on referral traffic. Referral traffic can provide significant value to an online business as it can be even more targeted and segmented than organic traffic.
Similarweb can help you identify new opportunities and manage your referral sources to get the best quality traffic.
Simultaneously, the platform lets you inspect potential partners and evaluate their traffic through multiple marketing channels and their audience's engagement.
You can keep track of all your referral sources and monitor how much traffic each brings in. This makes it easier to decide which ones are worth your investment.
Inspiration for Ad Creatives
Even with paid traffic, you never know what you're doing right. SimilarWeb's Ad Peeking capabilities can prove invaluable. You can set benchmarks for traffic and performance based on the performance of your industry and other competitors.
This allows you to see the ads of your competitors. It's a great way to see your competitors' ads, including the display and video ads, PLAs, and more.
It will also reveal which competitors use ad networks to reach their audience and what they do.
SimilarWeb For Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs can use SimilarWeb to gain insights into the market, customers, and competitors. SimilarWeb provides a wealth of information you can use to market products, promote your company, and grow it.
Benchmarking
SimilarWeb's primary function is to provide benchmarks based on other companies' performance. To understand your digital presence and improve it, you must first assess it. You can only learn how others are doing in your industry by looking at what they do.
Benchmarking is a great way to develop digital marketing strategies faster.
Market Research
SimilarWeb is an excellent tool for market research. It helps you identify emerging trends and gives you a detailed market analysis.
It is much easier to create campaigns that resonate with your market.
When you eliminate the guesswork associated with market research and industry analysis with real-time data analysis, you can quickly adapt to market trends and create campaigns based on the most recent market insights.
Company Research
SimilarWeb can be used for research on other companies. Whether you're looking for growth ideas or simply keeping track of your competition, this is useful. You can use SimilarWeb to research other companies through publicly-available information you won't find anywhere else, especially in such an easy-to-digest form.
SimilarWeb provides detailed information in its assessment of a company's digital performance. You only need to look at the data provided by its platform.
Discover the digital strategies of other companies and how they could generate revenue for your assets.
Audience Insights
Entrepreneurs can benefit from information about their audience. SimilarWeb is a valuable tool for companies who want to understand their customers' online behavior.
You can also use Similarweb's data to identify demographic information about your audiences, such as age, gender, and location. It will also tell your audience's search preferences, conversion rate, and inbound vs. outbound traffic.
SimilarWeb is a great way to increase your audience engagement, discover new audiences, and achieve your goals to grow your customer base.
Conversion Analysis
SimilarWeb is an excellent resource for finding new customers. It doesn't end there. You can continue to use it for your conversion efforts, providing detailed data from your digital marketing activities.
One of the most valuable data in SimilarWeb is conversion data. SimilarWeb offers every measure you need to understand the conversions of your customers.
It is an essential component of optimizing conversion strategies and driving sales.
SimilarWeb For Sales
SimilarWeb employs over 100,000 sales professionals who use its data insights for new business opportunities and closing more deals. It has increased win rates by 10%, sales opportunities by 30%, and ROI by 150 spans.
SimilarWeb's strengths are its ability to identify similar customer audience expansion opportunities, give actionable insight, improve lead quality and increase conversions.
Use Actionable Insights To Improve Your Sales Pitch
Your sales pitch is your first contact with your audience. You must improve your sales pitch until it meets the needs of your audience. SimilarWeb can help you create the perfect sales pitch by providing insights.
To empower your sales team, get a clear view of website traffic performance and a techgraphic. This will enable you to give actionable insights to help you close deals at a higher rate.
Qualify Your Target Audience
SimilarWeb makes it simple to get traffic. SimilarWeb's ability to analyze user behavior can be a tremendous asset in creating your ideal customer profile.
To ensure you get the highest return on your advertising investment, you can use digital revenue or performance data to help qualify prospects.
Qualifying prospects will allow you to focus your efforts on obtaining high-quality traffic and more conversions.
SimilarWeb For Investors
An investor must look beyond the company's financial performance. SimilarWeb is a powerful tool that can assess a company's digital health and performance.
This platform is excellent for finding new investment ideas and information about websites while also allowing you to monitor the performance of all your current companies through the dashboard.
Pinpoint Emerging Investment Opportunities
SimilarWeb gives you access to a quick source of investment ideas. The platform's database lets you stay up-to-date with new trends and players. It is updated every 48 hours.
Assess the Health of Any Company
SimilarWeb provides unprecedented insight into companies' digital health and performance, vital assets in evaluating investment opportunities.
Marketers and evaluators can use this information to confirm your decision to withdraw or invest. You can also use benchmarks on other websites to help you compare the performance of your investments.
SimilarWeb allows you to customize your analyses to the maximum extent. This allows you to search data from many contexts and focus on the most critical metrics.
Monitoring Your Company's Performance
SimilarWeb offers 360deg views of digital platforms, industries, and geographical locations. You can monitor this multi-faceted view and identify trends and inflection points for your business.
Similarweb offers many data options and layers, including monthly traffic, organic search performance, and geographic trends.
These data are constantly updated and can be invaluable to your investment portfolio.
Get A Complete Overview of the Digital Landscape
SimilarWeb provides unlimited data at the site and industry levels. SimilarWeb offers insights into engagement and web traffic and is one the most reliable data sources about digital marketing channels' performance.
This service is based on data collected from real users. This service is a treasure trove for audience information. It allows you to refine your SEO techniques by using keyword search filters.
The platform is the cherry on top. It is very user-friendly, data-rich, and user-friendly. It is easy to understand large amounts of information using visual data formats. You don't need to be a digital marketer to understand every dataset.
Pros, Cons, And Final Thoughts
SimilarWeb does have some shortcomings in addition to its benefits. On the whole, however, the outcome is positive. Those who see it as a digital revolution in marketing will enjoy the following benefits.
- Data sets of immense size. There are metrics for site visits, traffic volumes, sources, social media, and geographic distribution. You won't such a comprehensive database of the digital landscape anywhere else.
- Comprehensive Overview. A well-structured summary is provided here to provide a quick overview of all essential aspects of any website.
- An excellent user interface. It is easy to navigate large amounts of information using this interface, which is fast and responsive.
- International data. SimilarWeb collects data from the United States, Canada, and Europe.
- Data Exportability. Using SimilarWeb's export options, you can easily export data as PDF, PNG, or other formats.
SimilarWeb provides excellent web analytics services. However, it is not perfect. Similarweb will resolve several shortcomings in the platform in future updates. Among them are:
- Similarweb is not intended to be an SEO tool. This means that you will need a second expensive subscription to a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to cover all the aspects of digital marketing. I believe this is one of the critical areas the platform is looking to improve.
- Inadequacy in tracking unique visitors. Hopefully, this is another area where we will see improvements in 2022.
- Mobile traffic is a newly integrated feature that will go through some bumps.
- Accuracy goes down for smaller and micro-niche websites (less than 50K per month).
- The free version is limited.
Website owners and digital marketers will find SimilarWeb to be an invaluable tool. You can understand which strategies successful businesses bring to the table and how your company stacks against them through competitive intelligence.
The main obstacle to using Similarweb is its price tag. Suppose your company generates enough revenue to cover Similarweb's annual plans easily. In that case, you already need it, as it will allow you to unfold an array of growth and investment opportunities in your industry and beyond.