Competitor traffic analysis

Competitor traffic. Why study it and how to do it

Competitor traffic is essential information for successful business promotion. Someone knows that it can be tracked, while others are not aware of this possibility at all.

Those who do not know about the ability to track a competitor’s traffic are divided into two types: “I know what to do with this information” and “I don’t know what this information is for.”

Why do you need competitor analysis?

• Understanding the scope of work
• Determination of the best strategy for promotion based on the successful decisions of competitors
• Determine on which platform to develop the site (based on the choice of competitors)
• Decide whether to guest post
• Decide on usability
• Define relevant topics for content in your own blog
• And a lot of useful and interesting things to promote

But, this is not a panacea. Only an integrated approach to promotion, using versatile communication channels, can ensure stability, and this kind of guerrilla marketing can show newcomers the way, and those who have been in business for a long time, useful tricks for promotion.

And so step by step:

1. Choose your main competitors. If you don’t know who the competitor is in your niche, search in the search for key queries, pay attention to ad units.
2. Identify 3-4 main competitors. Choose only those who have achieved success, or those who are rapidly gaining momentum in your field.
3. Study in detail WEB site of the company. Pay attention to where the most traffic comes from, from which device, which target audience, which topics are popular.

Insight. Such a slice of analytics should be done on a regular basis in order to stay on the crest of the wave.

Estimating competitor traffic. Numbers and more.

Counter

Let's start from the smallest to the largest. The easiest and most commonplace way to find out the statistics of visiting a site in numbers is the counters on the site itself. On many sites, it may be in the footer (at the bottom of the site), or somewhere in the sidebar. As a rule, it shows the number of visits per 24 hours, week, month.

Pages "advertising on the site"

Many sites provide advertising services, namely the placement of banner ads or PR materials. For greater involvement of the potential client provide detailed statistics of visits to the site and a small cross-section of the target audience.

Specialized services for SEO analysis

Yes, and there are some, for example (SimilarWeb, SerpStat and others.) and we'll talk about them in more detail. In such services, you can get more detailed information about traffic, which in turn will give more room for maneuver.

With the help of special services, you can see statistics on visits to the site for the period, there is also an opportunity to see the dynamics of changes and compare with possible changes in marketing activity.

Displays traffic statistics by device as a percentage. The convenience of these statistics is manifested in the possibility to track and adjust the adaptation of information for different kinds of devices, or in some cases in principle to implement a variant for viewing from a mobile device.

Not unimportant information where exactly the main traffic comes from, from what countries, to understand the specifics of working with a particular region, and the correct setting of advertising campaigns.

In conjunction with the statistics of visits, information about the channels of traffic to the site. The options may be different: organic search, paid advertising, referral links, contextual advertising, transitions from email lists or from social networks.  Such data allows you to know which channel is most effective.

It is possible to study competitors' keywords, which are used to drive conversions to the site and compare them with your own, to get more effective performance.

And the best thing is that all this data can be compared in detail with the traffic of your competitors and yours. You can see where your conversion rate is higher and where it is lower, which channel is more successful for you and competitors. By doing this kind of analytics you can set a vector of growth of your company, because you already know where and with what you need to move.