Competitor Analysis, Lead Generation and Keyword Research with SimilarWeb

Having a business with an online presence necessitates being well-versed in the art of tracking and reporting key performance indicators. And the modern marketer is skilled at analyzing their site metrics, turning the insights into data-driven marketing efforts.

But what if you could get those same metrics on your competitors? 

Or perhaps on leaders in new sectors and industries you are thinking about expanding into?

What if you could get a clearer view of your ideal customers’ behavior online — not just on your website, but across the internet?

For most, this would reveal a treasure trove of helpful insights that could greatly improve their company’s data-driven marketing efforts. It even has the potential to impact production and new product releases.

I spoke with Jessica Bohm, Director of Marketing Intelligence, Agencies & Consultancies at SimilarWeb and here’s what I learned from our discussion.

SimilarWeb is a tool that offers competitor and consumer data, such as traffic estimations and engagement metrics on any website in the world. It’s a tool that ushers in a whole new level of data collection, proving that the future of marketing technology isn’t just using your own metrics to make business and marketing decisions. It’s about leveraging competitor data that was previously unavailable to us.  

“While most companies have this data on their own website via Google analytics, you can now see this information about your competitors’ websites and benchmark your business against them,” says Jessica

It’s possible to see extremely accurate estimates of how much traffic other sites and landing pages are receiving — and from which sources. The level of granularity that SimilarWeb offers is astounding, letting you collect just about any data point you’d like to know.

Here are just a few possible options:

• Exact keywords and sources generating traffic
• Engagement metrics, such as bounce-rate, pages per session, time on page, etc.
• Funnel insights, such as conversions, cart abandonment and more
• A breakdown of keywords in particular keyword groups that are generating the most clicks and purchases across multiple sites
• Paid ad insights, such as which retailers are getting which percentage of the clicks and traffic for a particular keyword
• Movement from different URLs, showing you what a consumer was looking for and the different sites they went to in order to find it
• Consumer intent insights, showing whether a particular search phrase was informational, transactional, etc.

How To Apply the Insights In Marketing And Business

SimilarWeb was originally designed to help marketers evaluate their competitors’ marketing efforts and optimize their own strategies.

For example, you can follow the customer journey on other websites, seeing what people are searching for, which pages they click, where they drop off and if/when they buy. 

This may be used to find gaps in the customer experience or your competitors’ funnels, but can also be used to monitor your company’s retailers and vendors — or find new ones. That data can help you understand how effectively a given website is driving sales to specific products.

Or it could give you a clearer picture of consumer behavior and usage trends across platforms. For example, revealing that a perceived drop in web traffic actually translated to more mobile app downloads.

SimilarWeb is also effective at identifying industry-wide consumer trends. Here’s a link to their webinars as promised inthe podcast: https://www.similarweb.com/corp/webinars/ 

“During the 2020 pandemic, our daily data provided nearly real-time insights into how certain industries were being impacted. We could see when and how they were impacted, as well as how long it took them to bounce back.”

Conclusion

Looking at the above information, it’s easy to understand why SimilarWeb is being used by data-driven marketing teams, sales teams, product development teams and even investors, giving them a look at the climate of a particular industry as well as a glimpse at where a business may be heading before they get there.

With every website in the world being categorized, information that was once only reserved for the owners and admins of a particular website is now becoming available to any data-driven marketer who wants to get a behind-the-scenes look at the competitor landscape. 

The applications for the data collected — as well as the departments that can leverage the insights gleaned from the data — is continually evolving.