Analyzing a website’s traffic provides insights and data that can be used to enhance performance by creating a better experience and generating more sales. These traffic checker reports are also useful in competitor analysis as you can use the data to enhance competitiveness.
There are various ways of analyzing user traffic, and the best one is Google Analytics, which provides first-hand data. However, I’m thinking you are not talking about your own website, so how do we go about finding out the traffic of a competitor? They will most definitely not share their Google Analytics account with you, so here are third-party tools you can use. Note that these tools generally provide an estimate.
SEMrush Traffic Analytics tool
SEMrush provides in-depth competitor analysis, and it is commonly described as an “all-in-one marketing toolkit.” The traffic analytics tool provides a domain overview that includes visits, unique visitors, page per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rate.
These can be viewed with a free account for up to 10 domains per day, but with a premium account, you can get in-depth analysis that includes backlinks, paid keywords, social media tracker, brand monitoring, and more. The biggest strength of SEMrush is that it provides a comprehensive suite of tools that can be used to analyze even the granular specifics of a website to provide you with a clear overview of the same.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most popular and respected tools within the blogging and affiliate marketing industry. The tool provides extensive competitor analysis that lets you compare up to five domains at once. It gives details such as the competitor’s backlinks (new, lost and broken), the best-performing pages, the domains that send most traffic there, SEO ranking, paid and organic traffic, and so much more.
With the tool, you can easily find which keywords your competitor’s rank for, and you can even see the search traffic each of these keywords generates. Some Ahref tools such as backlink checker can be used for free.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a dedicated tool meant for analyzing competitors, and it allows users to run reports on any URL for free and without an account. To analyze a competitor’s website, all you need is to enter the domain name in the search. SimilarWeb will then crawls its huge range of data sources to reveal data such as traffic overview, total visits, average visit duration, traffic by countries, and more.
The tool also has a premium plan that can be used to monitor competitor websites and app traffic statistics.
Alexa
Alexa is a popular tool from Amazon that ranks a website based on traffic. The tool provides some data for free such as “Alexa Rank,” which is a measure of a website’s popularity based on monthly data. Other reports include monthly searches, traffic sources, keyword usage, and monthly comparisons.
However, Alexa data shouldn’t be considered accurate since it only compares websites that use the Alexa toolbar, which accounts for just 1% of websites. Nevertheless, it still gives a free rough idea of competitor performance.
If you’d like a more in-depth and accurate analysis, then SemRush and Ahrefs are the way to go.