We’ve all heard the sayings and adages about staying in your own lane and not comparing yourself too much with others.
However, the opposite is true for ecommerce. Spying on the competition is not only recommended–it’s a must!
Tracking other brands’ website traffic can reap benefits like new ideas to try, good practices to undertake, and opportunities to leverage to drive traffic to your website.
With competitor traffic monitoring, you can stop twiddling your thumbs, and waiting for visitors to trickle in. Competitor tracking is a weapon to add to your arsenal.
Even the most intriguing products and most meticulously designed online store will not thrive without attracting traffic to the website.
If you’re wondering how your competitors are driving traffic to their site, you can unlock powerful knowledge with the tools we’ll mention below.
In this article, we’ll tackle the basics of website traffic and why it’s important to track your competitors’ traffic.
Then, we’ll talk about the tools to get the job done and the intricacies of web traffic analysis and benchmarking.
By mastering the art of attracting and engaging visitors to your online store, you'll pave the way for success in the competitive landscape of e-commerce.]
Hopefully, this will equip you with the tools and techniques you need to stay one step ahead in the cutthroat world of online retail.
Get ready to transform your e-commerce game and leave your competitors trailing in the dust!
A Guide to Competitor Traffic Monitoring
- What is website traffic?
- Importance of analyzing competitor traffic
- 5 tools to track competitors’ traffic
- Ahrefs
- Similarweb
- Semrush
- Google Analytics Benchmarking
- Panoramata
- How to analyze and compare competitor traffic
- Choose metrics that matter
- Benchmark yourself against your competitors
- Monitor traffic regularly
- FAQs
- How do I track competitors' content?
- How can I monitor other website traffic?
- How do you monitor competitors' activity?
What is website traffic?
Website traffic is the measurement of the number of people who visit a website or web page.
Traffic is measured through tracking tools like Google Analytics and can be further segmented into groups like unique visits, duration of the visit, actions taken, and source of traffic.
In ecommerce, website traffic is akin to the stream of shoppers strolling through a store. These visits present opportunities for engagement and revenue.
Importance of analyzing traffic
Understanding website traffic in the context of e-commerce is crucial for gauging the effectiveness of a brand’s marketing efforts.
If you observe what your competitor is doing with their website, you can see if their strategy is working by tracking their traffic volume.
This also gives you a glimpse of their sales performance and how they turn visitors into paying customers.
You can do what you wish with this knowledge and implement what’s working for your competitors to your brand.
By mastering the art of attracting and engaging visitors to your online store, you'll pave the way for success in the competitive landscape of e-commerce.
The other benefits of traffic tracking are:
- Benchmark your performance year over year against your competitors
- Compare your performance to previous years
- Monitor popularity during key marketing moments such as holidays
- See how your brand has grown over time
5 tools to track competitors’ traffic
Tracking your competitors’ website traffic is possible, thanks to the tools below. These are just some of the web traffic monitoring tools in the market.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a well-known keyword research and competitor traffic tracking tool. It can supply information like organic and paid traffic data, as well as backlink profiles and site audits.
All you need to do is type in the URL of your competitor’s website, domain, or subdomain and it will show you estimates of their organic traffic per month, backlinks, traffic by country and organic keywords.
On the downside, Ahrefs is limited to tracking a website’s organic search engine traffic.
Similarweb
SimilarWeb is an ecommerce benchmarking and web analytics tool designed to empower you with insights into your competitors’ website traffic sources, audience metrics, and keyword performance, among other valuable data points.
With SimilarWeb, you can delve into the specifics of each feature. For instance, when it comes to website traffic, you'll have the ability to pinpoint the geographic origins of your visitors, right down to the country or city level.
Additionally, you can analyze the breakdown of visitors arriving from organic sources, paid searches, or social media platforms.
However, SimilarWeb is not as effective for tracking small websites or brands. If your competitor is not a relatively big brand, the insights you’ll get from SimilarWeb will be lackluster.
Semrush
Semrush is commonly used for keyword analysis and advertising performance monitoring but it comes in handy when tracking competitor traffic, as well.
It has a free plan that will give you access to its basic features including up to ten traffic analytics reports.
The reports will show you metrics such as visits, unique visitors, average visit duration, and bounce rate.
They are based on clickstream data and traffic comparisons come with estimated accuracy scores. However, the free plan is limited but is enough if you want to get a feel for its features before making the leap.
Google Analytics Benchmarking
You're likely already aware that Google Analytics is a handy tool for tracking your website performance.
It offers a wealth of valuable data on your website's performance over time and allows you to gauge how you stack up against competitors in your industry.
Aside from that, you can use Google Analytics to compare website traffic in your industry. Just go to your Google Analytics dashboard and click Audience, then Benchmarking.
Choose an industry under “Industry Vertical”, a target country, and size by daily sessions. Google Analytics will then generate a report.
The caveat is that it doesn’t track specific competitors, so if you’ve identified your competitors and want to see data for each of them, you’re out of luck.
Additionally, the comparisons provided by Google Analytics are based only on the websites in the industry that have agreed to be tracked anonymously when they sign up for Google Analytics.
Historical data won’t be migrated either so you can only access data made when a site has started using Google Analytics 4.
If you want to save time and effort, you might be interested in the next tool on our list.
Panoramata
Panoramata is a platform dedicated to competitor tracking and benchmarking.
It monitors newsletters, email flows, SMS, ads, landing pages, and websites for you automatically so you don’t have to do it yourself.
You don’t have to stalk websites or landing pages piece by piece to get a glimpse into your competitor’s marketing strategy. It’s all done for you automatically and in one place.
The result? You save time and resources and get actionable insights based on real data.
It can complement any competitor traffic tracking tool because it can track website changes over time.
You can access any brand’s website on the platform and see and compare present and previous iterations of their homepage and landing pages.
Aside from that, Panoramata’s features and capabilities include:
- A dashboard for a real-time overview of your competitors’ published marketing assets
- Benchmarks that allow you to compare brands automatically against each other
- Follow brands you’re interested in
- Search through emails, flows, SMS, and ads
- A curated ads database for Tiktok, Meta, Google and Pinterest
- Historical data and statistics of landing pages and their ads
- Save and share inspiration lists
- Recommendations and Inspiration Searches so you never run out of ideas
How to use competitor traffic data
Choose metrics that matter
Narrow your competitor comparison process by identifying the metrics you want to use. The most relevant ones are pages per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rate, so you can start with those.
These metrics will give you a holistic picture of how their website visitors are interacting with their pages and how the website is performing.
Benchmark yourself against your competitors
Spot opportunities and improve your website’s weaknesses by benchmarking your efforts against your competitor’s website. See what strategies are effective for them and try to replicate them or take inspiration from them.
You can also use the data to identify gaps in your competitor’s website and optimize your own accordingly.
Monitor traffic regularly
A one-off competitor benchmarking won’t do. You have to regularly monitor your competitor’s marketing to detect patterns and changes in strategy.
By doing this, you’ll stay competitive and agile–essentially, you’ll stay ahead of the competition.
FAQs
How do I track competitors' content?
To track your competitors' content effectively as an e-commerce marketer, utilize tools like Panoramata or Ahrefs to monitor their website changes, keyword rankings, and content strategies.
How can I monitor other website traffic?
To monitor other website traffic as an e-commerce marketer, employ tools such as Panoramata or SimilarWeb to analyze your competitors' traffic sources, audience demographics, and engagement metrics.
Additionally, utilize Google Analytics to benchmark your own website performance against competitors and identify areas for improvement based on their traffic patterns and behavior.
How do you monitor competitors' activity?
Panoramata is a great all-in-one tool for competitor tracking, analysis, and benchmarking. It allows you to monitor things like your competitors’ newsletters, email flows, websites, ads, landing pages, SMS, and tech stacks.
