Analysis of competitor activities using SimilarWeb
22 September 2020Regardless of what area or industry your business is in, to be effective you need to know your competitors. And the best way to get to know them is to study their activities in detail and understand their development and distribution strategies.
Today we are going to take a look at one of the most popular and powerful tracking tools on the web – SimilarWeb.
SimilarWeb itself is quite expensive and because of this is not suitable for all companies, but at the same time, you can always activate a 7-day trial period for your company and get the most out of it. In addition, we strongly advise you to install the free SimilarWeb plugin on your browser – it offers a lot of useful information even for free. Before activating the trial period, we advise you to prepare. Here is the immediate procedure:
Search and identification of competitors
This should be done prior to activating SimilarWeb. In fact, this is the only step that will require manual work and will not be automated in any way. Study the market. Understand who your direct competitors are. For casinos, these may be those who offer the closest conditions or work in the same markets; among game developers, these may be companies that create similar games in the same genres as you – everything is individual here. Try to find several dozen companies that are closest in essence and spirit, you do not need to list hundreds of companies indirectly related to you. Spend a fair amount of time finding your direct competitors.
Basic analytics of competitors
Using a free browser plugin, determine which of the competitors has which amount of visits on their sites, which countries are especially interested in them, draw the appropriate conclusions from these statistics. At this stage, we plan to rank the competitors in terms of traffic volume from higher to lower and further study them in that order.
Digital Marketing -> Competitive Analysis -> Overview -> Website Performance
Available in trial version pro.similarweb.com. Explore the site of each of your competitors. You will be able to understand how much traffic their site attracts, who visits it, where visitors come from, for what requests, etc., get the most general information here. This section will provide general information about the competitor’s site.
Digital Marketing -> Competitive Analysis -> Search -> Keywords
Deleted: Available in trial version pro.similarweb.com. This section will allow you to determine which search queries were used by users to visit the site most often. This information can be directly used to optimize your contextual advertising campaigns in google ads and other tools. In addition to finding tons of ideas for new keyword search phrases to boost your budget, you will also be able to immediately drive traffic to keywords with the highest conversions, which will save your budget and increase your ad performance.
Digital Marketing -> Competitive Analysis -> Referral -> Incoming Traffic
Available in trial version pro.similarweb.com. In this section, you can understand where users come to your competitor’s site (or your site) from. In addition to search engines or social networks, all sites where a competitor has placed ads will be indicated here, so you can make a list of the most effective sites, and then contact their owners and request the cost of placements for a preliminary expected understanding of the effectiveness and cost of the targeted action, which will allow more efficiently and specifically identify the best sites, even with a limited budget.
Digital Marketing -> Affiliate Research -> Find Affiliates
Available in trial version pro.similarweb.com. In this section, you can select the industry in which your company operates and get a comprehensive list of sites that have indicated the same specialization. In essence, this will be a list of suitable sites for you to place ads, articles, posts and other content.
Of course, the SimilarWeb toolkit is not limited to this, even in the Trial version there are many other tools available, but even studying the above points will allow you, even within a seven-day trial period, to get the most useful information that will help you better study both your competitors and the target audience and places to post content about your product.