We know that web traffic is an essential element for success in e-commerce. The act of checking this info for your website (and those of competitors) is not particularly difficult. The problem is that many of these sites never publish their statistics, so it can be hard to get objective, accurate numbers.
The existence of advertisements and marketing information may serve as an indicator of a website’s traffic volume. The alternative is to use a website traffic estimator as a rough guide for the success of a particular site.
However, these estimates are not foolproof, so you should only use them as a relative measure. So with that in mind, you should only compare different site statistics from the same traffic estimator.
Now let’s get into the details of the top 7 sites that will help you to track your web traffic.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is one of the best web traffic estimators. The site’s Top Website Rankings page is a nifty feature. You can view the top-ranked websites by category and country. The free version of SimilarWeb gives the top 50 sites and also allows you to search for a particular domain and see that site’s statistics.
What happens when you search for a site? You receive three types of info:
- Global
- Country
- Category ranks
This helps you to easily assess the website’s competitiveness. Scrolling down further will give you the engagement data:
- Monthly traffic
- Average length of a visit
- Number of pages viewed per visit
- Bounce rate.
Each search also gives you further details. These include the decomposition of the traffic source, the top referring sites, traffic from social media, and audience demographics. The best thing is that these details are all available for free!
Quantcast
Quantcast is possibly the most accurate web traffic estimator that’s available. But you must be aware of two vital conditions:
- Its accuracy varies based on the site that’s being considered.
- It has a dataset that is limited in comparison to other sites such as SimilarWeb.
Why is that the case? This is based on how the Quantcast site operates. Each website would need to enable its own Quantcast data collection so that the program can estimate its traffic flow. Quantcast cannot accurately estimate web traffic for sites that don’t participate in its data collection process. So, unfortunately, you will not find data for less popular websites.
However, once a site is being tracked, Quantcast gives a wide range of information. The site’s demographic decomposition provides many insights. The analysis includes visitor ethnicity, shopping, and media interests, as well as occupations and even political affiliations.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an excellent search engine optimization (SEO) site. It’s often used by webmasters, for data mining search traffic information for your own website, and also those of your competitors. It goes beyond simply giving the monthly search traffic as it also tells you the types of keywords that yield high traffic flow. Ahrefs also offers access to backlink data, such as other sites that link to your site, the frequency of their linking, and how that data fluctuates over time.
What’s the downside? Although it is one of the strongest tools, it’s not free. There is, however, a seven-day, no-restrictions trial program for $7. Thereafter, the cheapest plan costs $99 per month. While it’s expensive, it yields quality analytical data.
SEMRush
SEMRush is mainly an SEO tool, which is most useful for website owners to discover and target keywords that generate improved organic (search engine) traffic. But an ordinary web surfer can also use it to view the type of search traffic that a website attracts.
You should note that SEMRush doesn’t provide actual web traffic numbers like SimilarWeb and Quantcast. This site is best used to explore your own search traffic and search patterns in various sites.
This tool gives you the most popular keywords for a particular website. You will also see the actual numbers and search engine rankings for these keywords. It’s possible to filter the stats by country to allow you to view search patterns on a regional level.
SEMRush gives free users 10 searches per day and a basic overview from those searches. The lowest-priced paid plan is approximately $100 per month.
Alexa
The Alexa tool is possibly the most recognized option for web traffic estimation. However, its free version has few options and is not very useful.
The program gives you the Global Alexa Rank and Country Alexa Rank for any website that you search for. You will also get a chart that tracks the changes in these rankings over the past year. The site provides some demographic details and keyword info but the free version only allows you to compare two websites and see which is more popular.
For more detailed analytical data, you will need to get the Insight plan at $79 per month. The upside is that it comes with a 7-day free trial. However, you will need to enter your credit card details, so be sure to cancel before the free trial expires.
SitePrice
SitePrice is not so much a web traffic estimator as it is a website valuator. When you search a website, you can access its estimated traffic and revenue info, daily pageviews, daily unique visitors and daily ad revenues.
You will find that this site’s estimates differ from those of SimilarWeb and Quantcast. This is due to its collecting data from several sources and averaging them to get approximate measures.
SitePrice does include other useful stats such as search engine visibility, backlink counts, the age of the domain, and a site’s top competitors. But you must remember that this tool is an estimator, so you should take its website valuations with the proverbial pinch of salt.
Traffic Estimate
Traffic Estimate does not have a particularly attractive interface, but it offers basic functionality. It provides an estimation graph which shows a given website’s traffic patterns for the past year, and a numerical value for the past 30 days.
You will also access info on the keywords targeted by a website. It can be useful in exploring competitors’ websites. However, it is quite simple, which can be underwhelming. It’s best to use Traffic Estimate as a supplement to the other web traffic estimators that we have discussed.
Measure Your Ecommerce Website Traffic
We have shared the details on the best web traffic estimators available on the market. You can choose the most suitable option to measure the traffic to your e-commerce website. Knowing the level of traffic that you currently get is a vital first step to improving the performance of your website.
