Have you ever wondered what your competitors are really up to and what strategies they use to grow their online presence?
Understanding your competitors' digital strategies is critical if you're serious about staying ahead in your industry.
The goal is not only to gather data on your competitors - your real goal is to be ablt to turn this data into actionable insights you can use to outperform your competitors, effectively.
A popular tool for tracking your competitors’ website traffic and gaining visibility into their performance is SimilarWeb.
It provides valuable insights into their website traffic, audience behavior, and referral sources.
Whether you’re interested in the free trial of Similarweb or analyzing your competitors’ paid search campaigns, Similarweb can give you an excellent overview, but it comes with limitations.
Indeed, it can give you some estimated data about your competitors, but :
- This data might not be accurate (and usually it's just a rough estimation)
- This data is static (ie. you can see how your competitors are doing at some point, but you can't effectively track them over time)
- It's mostly figures: even if this is helpful, they hardly translate into actionable insights and marketing campaigns you can launch.
Similarweb may lack the ability to provide more visual and deep insights, such as refining content strategies, analyzing shifts in marketing, or monitoring the latest promotions.
If you're looking for more than surface-level data, you may need a tool that provides more profound insights.
That's where Panoramata stands out.
You’ll learn everything about Similarweb in this article, where I break down:
- How to track your competitors’ website traffic with SimilarWeb?
- Similarweb strengths and limitations
- Why Is Competitor Traffic Tracking Important?
- Why Panoramata is the best Similarweb alternative for deeper, real-time marketing insights?
Let’s dive in!
What is SimilarWeb, and how does it help you track competitors?
When it comes to outperforming your competitors, having the correct data is critical.
Digital platforms such as Similarweb serve as essential resources for companies seeking to understand website traffic, enhance online performance, and analyze competitor website traffic.
SimilarWeb's Competitive Analysis Suite features powerful tools that provide valuable insights on your competitors' activities and performance.
Here are 3 key features that allow you to track your competitors with SimilarWeb:
- Similarweb Website Traffic Insights
- Audience Demographics and Behavior
- Similarweb Referral and Search Traffic
1. Website Traffic Insights
One of SimilarWeb's core features is its ability to provide estimates of your competitors' website traffic.
View your competitor's website traffic, including the breakdown of traffic sources (organic search, direct visits, paid campaigns, social media, or referrals).
This helps you understand where their traffic comes from and which channels they invest in the most.
Next, in the engagement section, you’ll see data on different metrics, including:
- Monthly visits
- Visit duration
- Pages per visit
- Bounce rate
- Etc.
These insights will give you valuable indicators of your competitors' digital performance.
Analyze these information and you can identify areas where you're falling short and find ways to improve your strategies.
2. Audience Demographics and Behavior
Similarweb allows you to keep an eye on your competitors' audience behavior and demographics-- useful for creating targeting campaigns.
You can access insights into your competitors' audiences, including details like geographic information, browsing patterns, and the likelihood of users searching for your competitors.
As mentioned, the metrics tell you how your competitors connect with their audiences and what content or product offerings resonate with their search patterns.
This information will reveal gaps in your existing targeting or content approach.
Digital platforms such as Similarweb serve as essential resources for companies looking to understand website traffic, improve online performance, and analyze competitor strategies.
3. Referral and Search Traffic
Another great feature of SimilarWeb is its ability to monitor referral traffic and evaluate the effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO).
It gives insight into which external sites drive visitors to your competitors' websites. This feature also identifies keywords that generate organic and paid search traffic.
With this information, you can identify opportunities to compete for similar keywords or reach out and work with sites that are beneficial to your competitors.
This data may be enough to track your competitors on a small scale and inform your strategies, which is often the case for large companies.
While Similarweb is great at supplying high-level metrics, it struggles when it comes to monitoring content strategy, adapting to marketing changes, or managing real-time campaigns.
That's not to mention that if your competitor lacks a strong market presence or significant traffic, the insights you gain may be limited and less useful.
The following section will explore Similarweb's limitations and show how Panoramata can help you track your competitors more efficiently.
Similarweb Strengths and Limitations
While Similarweb is a powerful tool for checking competitor website traffic, it's far fromflawless. You'll see how it can falls short especially for getting real-time insights or working with niche competitors in the list below.
Here are some of the key limitations that Similarweb's users often encounter:
- Accuracy and data reliability: One of the most common concerns is: "How accurate is Similarweb?"
Although Similarweb collects data from multiple sources (like browser extensions, ISPs, and public data), it only gives estimates, not exact numbers. That means you can still get discrepancies, especially for smaller websites or regional traffic.
- High cost for small businesses: The Pro version of Similarweb comes at a not insignificant cost of $125 per month. While it also has a 7-day free trial, the cost makes it less accessible to small businesses, startups, and companies with limited budgets.
- Limited data for small or niche sites: Similarweb focuses on high-traffic sites, so if you are trying to track new or small ecommerce websites, you're out of luck.
- No long-term data comparison: It's more challenging to look at historical trends with Similarweb because it doesn't offer long-term data comparisons. The most it does is give you weekly metric comparisons.
- Limited content insights: While it does give you traffic data, Similarweb doesn't give you the full picture. Itdoes not give you the ability to quickly access or analyze the specific content (such as landing pages, product pages, or ads) that drive traffic to your competitors' sites.
- No real-time marketing strategy monitoring: Similarweb cannot track changes to ad campaigns or SEO strategies in real time, which means you won't be as attuned to your competitors' strategy shifts and adapt quickly.
- No tracking of promotions or events: The platform also doesn't track important aspects of marketing strategies and competitor activity such as promotions, product launches, and events. This poses another challenge in monitoring short-term strategies that you can really take advantage of.
Why Is Competitor Traffic Tracking Important?
Understanding website traffic is essential in e-commerce, as it directly reflects how effective a brand's marketing efforts are.
By analyzing your competitors' traffic, you can:
- Gain valuable insight into what strategies are working for them.
- Measure the success of their campaigns.
- See how they engage their audience.
- Inspire from their best working practices.
- Get a sense of their sales performance by observing how well they convert visitors into customers.
With this said, you should be thoughtful about the tools you use to track your competitors.
Similarweb Alternatives – Why Panoramata Stands Out
Now, let’s say you want more than generic numbers.
You decide to track your competitors weekly, but can’t see any real-time insights.
What would you do?
Try Panoramata, one of the best Similarweb competitors. It’s a cutting-edge platform for tracking e-commerce competitors and benchmarking your performance.
This cost-effective and adaptable tool automatically scans newsletters, email campaigns, SMS, advertisements, landing pages, and websites.
The outcome?
You conserve your valuable time and resources while making effective decisions and doing business.
Panoramata goes beyond traditional competitor tracking tools, offering the insights you need to stay ahead of the competition and innovate with assurance.
This is why Panoramata is a better Similarweb alternative:
- Real-Time Dashboards and Historical Data
- Access to Marketing Content
- Analyze Strategy Shifts in Real-Time
- Monitor Promotions, Events, and Product Launches
1. Real-Time Dashboards and Historical Data
You can miss important trends when you use Similarweb because you have to do weekly checks manually or choose a three-month monitoring.
For historical data, Panoramata is a superior choice because it equips you with a real-time dashboard that gives you an instant snapshot of your competitors' latest marketing efforts, including but not limited to ads, landing pages, and email campaigns.
Panoramata automatically records historical data on landing pages, websites, and ads, which means you can compare two versions of a page or ad side by side. That way you can quickly see what changes they made and hypothesize what led them to make those changes to their strategies.
2. Access to Marketing Content
Similarweb's traffic data is great but it clearly lacks one thing: content responsible for the traffic.
Panoramata addresses this important facet of marketing with advanced search tools and marketing creatives databases. You can see the email campaigns, SMS initiatives, advertising tactics, and conversion strategies your competitors are running and cross-reference it with the traffic they're getting.
Panoramata's searchable ad databases sourced from platforms such as TikTok, Meta, Google, and Pinterest are updated in real time so you always have a finger on the pulse of your competitors' moves and can see trends and opportunities quickly.
3. Analyze Strategy Shifts in Real-Time
Let's face it--identifying changes in marketing strategies with Similarweb takes time and effort.
Panoramata avoids this problem with its automated benchmarks for each industry, allowing you to compare multiple brands effortlessly.
You can also create your own benchmarks filled with competitors you are tracking and Panoramata will automatically populate the benchmarks with details on organic traffic, ad scores and stats, email performance, and more.
With Panoramata, you can track and highlight changes in competitors' marketing approaches, pricing, and messaging without undue effort on your part.
4. Monitor Promotions, Events, and Product Launches
Last but not least, Similarweb does not have a way to track specific promotions or product launches.
In contrast, Panoramata tracks everything from new campaigns and events to seasonal promotions.
In this example, you can see how JLo’s brand adapts its emailing campaigns to the fall and then to Christmas.
This is a great way to access your competitors' content and promotion calendars, see when they launch their campaigns, and decide when to launch your own.
FAQ
1. What does Similarweb track for competitor analysis?
Similarweb provides insights into your competitor’s website traffic, audience demographics, top-performing content, and referral sources. This information helps you understand your competitors' online strategies and benchmark your performance.
2. How accurate is Similarweb’s data?
Similarweb's data is based on estimates from a variety of sources, making it generally reliable for trend analysis and market comparisons. However, while the insights are valuable, they may not be 100% precise.
