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What is SimilarWeb?

SimilarWeb is the pioneer of market intelligence and the standard for understanding the digital world. SimilarWeb provides granular insights about any website or mobile app across all industries in every region. SimilarWeb is changing the way businesses make decisions by empowering marketers, analysts, strategy professionals, business development teams, investors, executives and more with the insights they need to succeed in the digital world. By enabling visibility into behavior on every website and mobile app, SimilarWeb allows customers to understand the online world, benchmark performance, identify new opportunities and optimize their digital strategy. SimilarWeb empowers the world's biggest brands like Airbnb, Walmart, eBay and adidas to develop and execute the strategies necessary to win market share.

similarweb

SimilarWeb Review

SimilarWeb is a very simple but powerful tool that helps you keep track of several key aspects of your website, audience and competitors.

When you sign up for an account, you’ll see a screen like the one below prompting you to analyze a website.

After entering the website you want to analyze, you can view all the information that SimilarWeb has to offer, which includes in-depth traffic, SEO and audience data.

SimilarWeb Traffic Sources

There are several viewing options here and various graphs to show you how your website is bringing in traffic.

The most important information to be gleaned from these different views is exactly where your traffic is coming from. You can categorize traffic sources by type (referral, search, organic, email, direct, etc.) and the website or application from which they were directed to your site.

Breaking each of these down even further, you can then access a graph view to see what percentage of your traffic of each particular type comes from any given source. An example of this is shown below.

Essentially, referrals will be broken down by the website from which they were referred, social traffic will be broken down by the social media sites they came from, etc.

If you use display ads, this feature is particularly helpful in understanding how your advertisements are working. And when used in conjunction with the audience analysis feature (which I’ll go in to below), you get an in-depth view of audience interests and how to capitalize on them through advertisements.

On the left-hand bar of this page, you can choose to explore any of the different types of traffic sources to see more details for them.

These traffic metrics are very important to follow because they keep you in tune with your website’s engagement. You can follow whether or not visitors are increasing, where they’re coming from, and how that’s changing over time.

similarweb chrome

SimilarWeb Audience Interests

With this excellent audience analysis feature, you can break down your audience’s interests so that you can better understand their needs. This is essential to make sure you’re creating a website experience that your particular audience will enjoy and come back to.

The various views—like the word cloud, list view and category distribution—offer helpful insights into the internet habits of your audience.

Firstly, the word cloud categorizes search terms and interests by how common they are in a very visual format. Simply by looking at the biggest words in the cloud, you’ll get a better idea of what themes and topics interest your audience the most.

This is extraordinarily beneficial for creating engaging content that appeals to your target audience.

Similarly, the category distribution view shows the broader categories in which your audience is interested, like computers and electronics, art, news, career, etc.

And finally, the list view gives you a more qualitative understanding of your audience by breaking down search terms and websites by category, global rank and affinity score.

Ultimately, the website that knows their audience better will win their traffic, so this analysis isn’t a step to be skipped over.

SimilarWeb Industry Analysis

The industry analysis feature is incredibly powerful and helps you understand exactly how your market is changing over time because of, for example, a competitor taking your business.

Industry analysis doubles as competitor analysis because the other people in the industry are your biggest competitors. Using this tool to compare yourself to the industry and better understand your competitors can give you the edge over them you need.

The great part about this tool is that it gives you detailed information about your competitors’ audiences and their internet habits. For example, you can access the average time of visits, average number of page views per visitor, traffic types and sources, and analyze the industry leaders.

With the industry leaders function, you can see who’s getting the most traffic from each type of source, which will in turn help you learn how to best utilize that type of traffic.

This powerful suite of competitor analysis tools truly gives you the edge by helping you understand your competitors, their audience, their traffic, and how to beat them.

similarweb chrome extension

SimilarWeb Drawbacks

One potential drawback I found with SimilarWeb is that while it offers a large variety of tools, it doesn’t give you the maximum number of features within each tool.

For example, I feel that there’s a lot more audience data that could be included here, like demographics and engagement rates.

Quantcast is a similar tool that seems to fill these gaps quite thoroughly, giving you all this audience data as well as traffic monitoring.

Another downside is that the traffic data SimilarWeb gives you doesn’t always appear to be 100% accurate, especially for smaller websites.

Overall, however, it’s very simple to use and can provide some phenomenal results.

similarweb extension

SimilarWeb Pro Benefits

The main benefits of SimilarWeb Pro are its scalability, its extensive analytics, its robust feature set, and its flexible pricing. Here are more details:

SimilarWeb Scalable

Companies from various industries and sizes (PayPal, Outbrain, Taboola, eBay, Eventbrite and Flipkart.com to name a few) can utilize SimilarWeb Pro to boost their website’s reach and gain more audience. Aside from that, they can also take advantage of the system’s features for their acquisition and merger activities as well as marketing expansion ventures.

similarweb pricing

SimilarWeb Provides extensive analytics functions

SimilarWeb Pro provides its users with insights with regards to their competitor’s website traffic and mobile apps performance. The platform allows you to check traffic data of any indexed website from a web-based control panel. You can investigate the website’s pageviews, monthly visits, visit duration and bounce rate. It can also display information about the site’s geographic traffic details and audience interests. This tool also has the reporting functionality that is usually expected from a premium BI product but it is a lot more customizable which means that users can tailor the reports to their respected industry requirements.

SimilarWeb Robust features

Large and multinational enterprises will not find SimilarWeb Pro lacking in features as the system features multi-user access, top quality professional support, extensive API integration, and custom reporting. It also allows unlimited websites.

SimilarWeb Flexible pricing

One of the admirable features of SimilarWeb Pro is its flexible pricing scheme. For starters, they offer a free plan. The tool also uses a quote-based pricing system so that clients pay for the features that they only need or can afford. The vendor also offers a free live demo without strings attached.

similarweb pro

 Pros of SimilarWeb

  • Till then I was only using the free version. But after jumping onto SimilarWeb Pro, the more comprehensive data analysis helped me improve my understand of web traffic.
  • So that we know if it is actually worth to "cooperate" with other website, for example when it comes to link exchange based on the reach each website has.
  • I use SimilarWeb Pro to compare my company's website performance with the industry leaders for several countries. It helps me understand our position and identify improvement opportunities.
  • This is great for analysis the performance of competitor websites. It provides up to date comparison of how my own website is performing and compares it to those of competitors.

Cons of SimilarWeb

  • Doesn't work well for website that has small traffic volumes. It can suggest very odd competitors to benchmark.
  • I don't like when you sort the results by some columns there's no data and they ask you to upgrade.
  • The sample size per market seems to be small, so the accuracy and reliability of their data is questionable.
  • I think the traffic data is updated with a delay.

similarweb review

SimilarWeb Pricing and Discount with Promo, Coupon code

The price of SimilarWeb completely depends on your personal situation, which is why there’s no specific pricing listed on the website.

One major plus is that you can use the free version for as long as you want, but only with certain features accessible.

I found the free version to be more than enough if you’re just looking after your own website.

But if you own multiple websites or have multiple people working on them, it might make sense to upgrade to the paid version. Enterprise plans allow you to add more users to your account so that different people in different departments are able to see and use the same data.

what is similarweb

Conclusion

If you are a site owner or an online marketing professional, SimilarWeb can provide competitive intelligence on your industry and main competitors. It enables you to learn what your competitors are doing, benchmark their performance and get a sense of your business landscape. For campaigns measurement and advertising decision making based on traffic size and conversion rate, you should pay close attention to the data estimates provided by SimilarWeb and decide whether or not they make sense compared to accurate data you get from Google Analytics for example.

With regards to audience geo profile, if you are interested in measuring worldwide traffic, SimilarWeb may be your best choice. Finally, when it comes to evaluating the percentage breakdown different traffic sources are driving to the analyzed site, SimilarWeb delivers a fairly accurate estimation.

All in all, SimilarWeb is a must have for “heavy duty” online marketers.

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Shafiq Armani
I'm Shafiq Armani, an expert in selling group buying tools. With more than 10 years of experience in the digital marketing industry
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