SimilarWeb is an online competitive intelligence platform, empowering users with insights about their competitors. SimilarWeb tracks the entire web, with data for both Desktop and Mobile, as well as a country breakdown for over 60 countries around the world.
SimilarWeb started as a platform that only recommends who the direct competitors are, as in the sites online companies should be paying attention to. Today, SimilarWeb is perhaps the most comprehensive platform that provides full traffic data, as well as breakdowns by Country, Pages, Subdomains or subfolders, Keywords, as well as Social Media, Email, Display, and Referring domains traffic.
The Market Research Solution allows users to understand each industry and niche inside out. Mainly, through how traffic is distributed between the top sites and the market share of each. It allows you to see a top leaders breakdown, country breakdown, with a monthly change, traffic share, monthly users/sessions, and Mobile to Desktop ratio.
For years, the company’s slogan was “I Know Your Marketing Strategy”. And we believe that for web market research, today, SimilarWeb provides the most comprehensive solution.
In the past, SimilarWeb used to be a tool only for enterprise companies since most packages would be available for over $5,000 per month. But today, SimilarWeb also offers a lean solution starting at $199/month for SEO and affiliate marketers, and $499/month for paid marketers.
Over the past few years, SimilarWeb’s main focus was to offer a traffic estimation for all websites of the world, and the monthly traffic data is available even for free on both SimilarWeb.com, and browser extensions.
On May 12, 2021, SimilarWeb went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the SMWB symbol. With a share price of $22, SimilarWeb is now worth over $1.6 billion dollars. Congrats!
Direct Competitors
Alexa, Comscore, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz Pro
Best known for:
- Traffic Data of all sites
- Full traffic breakdown by all traffic sources
- Categorizing the entire web to 200 categories
- Referring sites stats with comparison mode
- Traffic engagement data
- Tool for Enterprise level
We love it for:
Full Website Traffic Overview, for any site
SimilarWeb allows you to understand the traffic to any website. How many users and sessions, Desktop vs. Mobile, countries, and what composes every site’s traffic share. Meaning, a full traffic breakdown. While SimilarWeb’s traffic estimations are just estimations and not 1st party data. It seems that SimilarWeb’s data is the closest, since they have been collecting data for years and they are getting better at it every year. Naturally, the estimation for smaller sites isn’t great, and recently they have limited the data to 10K sessions per month as the minimum size for which they provide traffic estimations. For larger sites, it’s now getting better and better, often around 85%-90% accuracy from what we’ve been able to see so far, compared with properties we have access to through Google Analytics.
Referrals data
SimilarWeb’s Referral Traffic report (or the Incoming Traffic report), allows you to see which websites are driving traffic to any website. This may include both advertising and partnerships of any kind, as well as random traffic going from one site to another.
Next to every domain that is referring traffic to another, you can see its category (site’s industry), Global Rank, and Traffic Share of all traffic referred to the domain you’re checking. One of the coolest features to add here is the comparison mode, which can easily highlight the domains that are referring traffic to a few of your competitors, but not to you. Think Ahrefs’ Link Intersect, just for referring traffic. This report is extremely powerful and actually can’t be found anywhere else. Are you looking to increase your site’s traffic through partnerships? This is one of the best ways to get started.
Page, Subfolder, and Subdomain breakdown
You can break down a domain’s traffic by a single page (and its change Month over month), subfolders which are often used as categories, and even subdomains. The Traffic Share metric and change is very helpful when checking out a specific competitor over time. Highly valuable when you track competitors and want to see the changes they are going through.
Comparison Mode with up to 4 domains
The comparison mode allows you to add up to 4 domains for every metric and report. By default, SimilarWeb will recommend to you the 4 competitors that they see as your direct competitors, but obviously you can choose any domain of your choice. Then, every metric SimilarWeb offers will be shown in a Comparison table mode. This includes general traffic and engagement metrics, and all the way to specific keywords or referrals that drive traffic to each of the 5 sites. This comparison mode is also doing quite a decent job visualizing the differences with colors. We like that.
Keyword data including SERP Features
While SimilarWeb isn’t known as an SEO tool, its Keyword Overview report is quite powerful.
The Search Volume and Search Visits data isn’t coming from Google, but rather it’s SimilarWeb’s own Clickstream data collected by them. The search volume is available for both Global scale and local by country, similarly to Ahrefs, and it’s followed by a few interesting SERP Features stats. Those include CPC, ratio of Paid clicks (Organic vs. Paid), as well as the ratio of searches that end up with no clicks.
You may create your own keyword groups, then get search volume in bulk, as well as get a dedicated report for Paid search, Organic, Mobile, and a top leader in every country (GEO).
Don’t miss: The new Keyword generator tool is pretty cool, and can help you find keyword ideas based on keywords similar sites are ranking for.
Free and Unlimited Browser Extension with Traffic data
The free browser extension is simply great. Why? Because it is still totally free, and gives you a nice partial overview for every single domain. The extension is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, and provides the top 5 stats without limitations for: Monthly sessions, Bounce rate, page/visit, Avg. visit duration, top 5 countries, and traffic sources ratios.
Engagement Data per domain
You can find some basic yet very interesting engagement data for every site. This one is also available with the comparison mode as we’ve already described above.
Perhaps bounce rate or visit duration are two metrics that people often don’t really trust because of how Google Analytics calculates them, but here we are speaking about benchmarks and comparisons between similar sites. Also, don’t forget that this is a 3rd party evaluation of SimilarWeb, no cookies, no GA settings changes. In a way, this is a lot more accurate.
App data
App data isn’t SimilarWeb’s main focus nor forte. It isn’t AppAnnie or SensorTower, and it isn’t trying to be. But as a full competitive intelligence service, SimilarWeb couldn’t fully ignore the apps that are only rising every year in the last decade.
We like the downloads estimation per app, the usage trend of the past 6 months, open rate in comparison between apps, and app category analysis which allows us to see the most popular apps by country and category.
Website Categories with Market Share
Every website you are looking at with SimilarWeb is labeled under a specific category. SimilarWeb decided to divide the entire web to 211 categories, from Entertainment to Shopping, from Finance – general to Finance insurance, from Health to lifestyle, sports, cars, and all the way to adult sites.
Since many websites could be potentially labeled in more than one way, you can also create your own custom categories. Then, you can check your category overtime, and see how the market share of each website is changing. For all traffic, just Desktop, or just Mobile.
Easy to use API
SimilarWeb also offers to all Pro users an easy-to-use API. Simply choose the needed domains, required metrics, and your time frames, and get your Google sheet populated with your data in seconds.
Missing Features:
- Content explorer to suggest content ideas
- Link Index
- Rank Tracker
- Native advertising (Taboola/Outbrain) intelligence
Pricing
Search & Affiliate Marketing basic solution – $199/month
Performance Marketing Solution – $499/month
Research/Sales/Investors/Premium solutions are not published on SimilarWeb, but we can tell you that these are starting with $3000/month for new clients, and depend on the number of countries you choose to have data for.
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