Traffic source Analysis (9)
Hi,
I'm trying to learn how to figure out traffic sources, strategies of popular websites.
It looks like both websites https://www.instafollowers.co https://www.ampfluence.com/ started blogging around the same year 2018 consistently.
According to similarweb, one has 1.48M visits/mo and the latter has only 61k/mo. I'm wondering what instafollowers.co may have done that the latter didn't do to have such huge traffic?
https://justanotherpanel.com/ has 584k visits/mo and their main traffic source is about 70% direct. What could this 'direct' traffic come from?
What's the best way(s) to reverse engineer competitors' traffic sources, tactics, strategies?
Many thanks!
similarweb is way off, in fact similar web sucks since GDPR came into play
Similarweb is really off... I've tested this many times with my own websites, the numbers were far away from the reality.
But there is still some value to it. Based on the limited sample I had access to (websites where I knew the real traffic levels) it correctly identified the overall "size", so if it showed some site had WAY more traffic than some other, it was almost always the case. Once the numbers got closer, it wasn't that accurate anymore and would regularly show more traffic for the site that actually had more. So take the data with a big grain of salt.
Any methods to figure out hidden, grey-black hat tactics websites may be using? can this also be discovered with Ahrefs?
Thank you for sharing your insights!
Originally Posted by henrynguyengbr2016
So in a way, you will see whether they engage in greay/black tactics when it comes to building links. And you can also check how well they rank for related keywords. It's really a useful tool.
I'm using SimilarWeb and analyse traffic sources pretty successful, but maybe it's because I'm using professional paid version, not sure
It's not always easy to get to this kind of info, especially with some free tools, similarweb was something that worked pretty well earlier, but now I notice it doesn't give so accurate results anymore, so you can't really rely only on that. One of the good tools for analyzing traffic sources is Ahrefs, or a similar one that allows you to perform deeper analyses on your competitor's behavior and activities on the internet, so you could check it out if you get the chance, Ahrefs is a bit pricey but it's a worthy investment for these kinds of stuff.
Originally Posted by vortexalpha
I think they just calculate these by looking at the positions for the keywords they track and use some estimate on how large % click on any given placement.
For example, for the #1 spot in google they count with about 10% CTR on the search result listing. So if their systems estimate a KW to have 5000 searches a month, they will add 500 visits to the organic traffic for that KW per month. On the #1 0 spot, they estimate CTR to be about 3%, so that would be 150 visits a month added to the organic traffic estimate.
The % obviously depend on the snippet shown in the search result, so they naturally must vary a lot. On top of that, their search volume estimates aren't accurate either, so the final real number can be WAY higher than what they estimate, but also significantly lower.
So yeah, these estimates really need to be taken with a large grain of salt.
On the other hand, their backlink analysis seems to be very good and it can help a lot.
Yes, agree on this totally, data isn't perfect and you can't rely only on it when making some decision since search volumes aren't that accurate, but still better than on some other tools I've used earlier where you couldn't manage to get any kind of info about this as they put it in some range that doesn't say anything. I like and use Ahrefs especially for backlinks analysis and looking where our competitors are promoting and where they have their backlinks places as it help us get some new ideas for advertising.
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