Getting data on Website Traffic is an important part of SEO strategy for any website or online marketer. You need to get data on your website traffic stats as well as competitor’s traffic stats to analyze and plan your content and marketing strategy.
We need to look at a dependable data provider for your marketing campaigns. It doesn’t make sense to use a tool if we can’t trust the data if you are going to use it.
There are plenty of tools to analyze traffic data of your website or competitor website. Today, we are going to look at two titans of Website Traffic Analysis , SEMrush Traffic Analytics and SimilarWeb. We will review each of the tool features for selected criteria and analyze which tool is providing accurate data and benefits. We will also look at the price and subscription plans of each of these tools as well.
Contents
So make sure to read this review until the end. That way you can make the best decision for you.
Let us look at each of the tools and basic features:
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a popular web measurement and competitive intelligence tool. Its analytic resources allow you to monitor developing opportunities and business health. It can also help content marketers improve their decision-making processes.
SimilarWeb allows you to spy on the competition. It lets you assess similar sites, gathering critical intelligence to benchmark your site’s performance. It allows you to learn about proven business techniques and new growth opportunities.
SEMrush
SEMrush represents a more holistic option when it comes to managing digital marketing. It monitors traffic analysis for websites along several marketing channels. Its data lets digital marketers make smarter decisions.
The service also boasts an auditing tool that allows you to identify possible SEO weaknesses. When you address these issues, expect to see improvements in your rankings.
SEMrush provides critical insight into rival websites. It lets you assess competitor digital marketing campaigns. It also keeps you in the loop when it comes to the topics that your target customers search.
Now we have a basic idea about each of the tools, let us dig into feature by feature comparison of each of the tools with respect to which is the best WebSite Traffic Analysis tool.
Global and Regional Data
SEMrush Traffic Analytics offers full access to traffic stats from 190 countries, with the ability to filter by location. All the regions are available in one subscription.
As you can see above, the SEMrush Traffic Analytics gets traffic from over 190 countries each sorted out nicely with the country traffic percentage.
SimilarWeb also possesses data across a whole range of territories but offers access only to purchased databases. At that, each country’s database is priced separately.
Based on the above data and price you pay, SEMrush is clearly Winner in this round.
Detailed Traffic Journey Analysis
When we are looking at a detailed Traffic Journey, our goal is to check what is the incoming source of traffic to our website and what is traffic going out from our website to other sites. Also what is type traffic we are getting into our website i.e is it coming from Google Search, Direct traffic , social traffic or Paid Traffic.
Both tools provide data on direct, organic search, referral, paid search, and social traffic types. Besides giving type of traffic, both tools provide a user journey to the website i.e source from where the user landed on the website and where the user went after the user visited the page.
SEMrush Traffic Journey:
If we go into more details traffic insights, SEMrush Traffic Analytics has a Top Pages feature that allows you to see which sources led traffic to specific pages of a domain. In addition, you can benefit from the general SEMrush subscription and reveal the researched company’s advertising campaigns, keyword strategy, and content across the media.
SEMrush traffic source types:
SimilarWeb provides a more detailed analysis of the traffic sources at a basic level. But it also provides two additional channels: display ads and emails data so for traffic analysis.
SimilarWeb Traffic Source Types:
For this feature, SImilarWeb is providing more data it includes data from Emails and display Ads.
SImilarWeb Wins this round compared to SEMrush.
Traffic to the Most Popular Pages
SimilarWeb used to have a feature called Popular Pages that ranked inner pages by their page views’ share. Recently, the feature has been made unavailable to the wider audience.
Meanwhile, SEMrush Traffic Analytics has the Top Pages report, giving you a list of the most visited pages on a website, counting both internal and external visits. You can filter the ranking by unique pageviews, unique visitors or entrances and also have a look at the entrance sources. Sounds like this feature can lead you to some insightful conclusions and bring another point to the SEMrush tool.
Top pages:
SEMrush wins this round as Popular Pages features are included in the subscription plan. No need to pay additional to access this feature.
Mobile Traffic Data
As per general statistics , more and more people are using mobiles to browse through the internet, mobile traffic analysis is also an important factor.
Both tools provide mobile traffic data analysis.
SEMrush mobile traffic data:
Similar Web Mobile traffic data;
Key difference between these two tools is SEMrush Traffic Analytics, mobile traffic data is fully available under the Traffic Analytics plan but In SimilarWeb, it needs to be purchased separately.
This makes SEMrush a clear winner compared to SimilarWeb for this feature.
Audience Analysis & Demographics
When we are looking at Audience Analysis and Demographics, we are looking at Audience age, Gender, Interests , Geography etc to understand Audience stats related to traffic coming to your site. Both tools provide extensive data on this. Let us see the key differences.
With SEMrush Traffic Analytics, you can check the audience overlap between any websites. The subscription also includes the new Market Explorer tool, which helps you discover demographics (age and gender) and interests of the in-market audience. The features also allow you to discover similar websites.
With SimilarWeb, you can analyze audience demographics, interests, and geography in detail. You will get to see similar websites in the tool as well. However, the audience overlap feature is not available.
Audience overlap stats will be helpful to check what audience is showing interests in similar websites in your competitor domain. Apart from this , both tools provide good data.
SEMrush is the winner in this round due to Audience overlap feature.
Industry/Category Analysis
SEMrush Market explorer can help doing Industry/Category analysis by listing relevant websites similar to the one you enter. These are the domains who are in the same market and working in the same industry.
Now the tool has the impressive SEMrush Growth Quadrant that puts all the competitors into four categories, depending on their websites’ audience size and growth rate. This can help you understand market positions of individual businesses, as well as understand the market development and potential in general.
You will get the most accurate picture if you analyze your custom list of competitors in the tool.
Don’t be confused by the fact that such amazing market analysis features belong to another tool — SEMrush Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer are purchased as a one-piece solution. This means, to get access to these reports, you will only need to switch tabs in the interface.
In SimilarWeb, industry analysis is crystal clear. You can check category performance, traffic share, and leaders of the industry, and benchmark yourself against these metrics.
Both SEMrush and SimilarWeb have comparable features and both are winners in this round.
Historical data
Access to historical data is another important factor in Website Traffic Analysis.
SEMrush provides access to Historical data on any subscription since April 2018 while in SimilarWeb ,the available data range depends on subscription: the basic one includes only 12 months.
Obviously, SEMrush is the clear winner in this case.
API Access
If you are a bigger organization , you want access to traffic data through API to integrate into your internal applications. Let us see how both tools provide access to API.
SEMrush Traffic Analytics offers API access by request. It can be obtained independently from the interface subscription, which means you don’t have to buy Traffic Analytics if you only need this data for your custom reports or integration to your product.
In general, data is arranged in a more user-friendly way in SEMrush. For example, to receive all the main stats on a domain, you need to make just one query. Same features, if you need access in SimilarWeb, it takes three queries. Limit-wise and effort-wise, this is more efficient.
What truly makes SimilarWeb different is their comprehensible UI. You can clearly see how many API units you have spent and how many you have left. There are even special Similar Websites API and Adult Websites API. So, overall, you can get more data with SimilarWeb API.
SimilarWeb is the winner in this round.
Accuracy
To gauge the data accuracy, data is collected from your own domain from both SEMrush Traffic Analytics and SimilarWeb and then comparing stats with what you see in Google Analytics.
As both tools use similar algorithms of clickstream data collection, projection, and estimation, there will be discrepancies in that data as most of the data is based on estimations.
The question is, how big is this discrepancy?
Before we present you with what we’ve found out, we want to emphasize one thing: both traffic analytics tools were made for the competitive analysis that always tells the most when it is compared to similar data collected and what is the deviation percentage.
To check the tools’ accuracy, OWOX BI conducted their independent research. They compared data from Google Analytics accounts of 787 anonymized websites with more than 100,000 visitors per month, observed by OWOX BI, with the stats that SEMrush Traffic Analytics and SimilarWeb showed. The numbers in the graph show the % of difference between internal analytics and competitive intelligence tools. The smaller the error, the higher the accuracy.
According to OWOX, SimilarWeb data accuracy didn’t correlate with website traffic volumes, while SEMrush Traffic Analytics showed a clear tendency to be more accurate for large domains.
SEMrush Traffic Analytics also shows an “Estimated accuracy” sign at the top of the interface. The larger the audience of an analyzed website, the higher the accuracy, the tooltip indicates.
Don’t be scared by the fact that discrepancy exists at all: as this possible error is applied to all the researched competitors’ domains, it shouldn’t distort the picture if you compare them with each other.
SEMrush is providing more accurate data as traffic volume grows giving you dependable data points.
SEMrush is Winner this round.
Pricing
Let us compare pricing plans for both SEMrush Traffic Analytics and SImilar Web.
All features for competitive website traffic analysis included in the SEMrush Traffic Analytics tool, all regional databases, and historical info are available for $200/month. You get all the benefits mentioned in this article, including the unbeatable keyword database, by adding any SEMrush subscription — so, the price for the entire package will start from $299.95/month. Most importantly, the price will be the same for every market.
SimilarWeb has a more complicated payment scheme. Each country database must be purchased separately, and many features (top pages, mobile data, etc.) also need to be paid for individually. Even the basic package is expensive and has no fixed price.
What’s more, many features (from mobile data to top pages) also represent individual buys. In conclusion, even the most basic package has no fixed price. One thing’s for sure, though, it’s going to cost you.
This makes SEMrush a clear winner in price point of view as well.
Which tool to choose for website traffic analysis?
Based on the above analysis , SEMrush Traffic Analysis tool gives more options in terms of tools and features for the price you pay for the subscription compared to SimilarWeb. That way, along with Website Traffic Analysis, you also can do detailed analysis of other digital marketing channels like backlink research, Keyword Research , Social Media Research and Paid Traffic research.
You can generate plenty of Website traffic analysis reports with both the tools as well.
If you are still thinking, you are open to exploring more on both the tools. You can do so by signing up trial period access to analyze features and come to a conclusion. As far as me, my vote goes to SEMrush.
7-day Trial access for SEMrush
Free Trial access for SimilarWeb
I have put a lot of effort and time into writing this article. Please review both tools and comment below what features you like most and what you don’t like. Happy to hear your feedback.
I have an article on how to get SEO secrets from SEMrush if you plan to do competitive research analysis for your website as well which includes Keyword Gap, BackLinks, Paid Traffic and Social Shares of your own and your competitor websites.
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