Do you want to see how much traffic a website gets? There are a few different ways to do this.
Before I get to those, though, here’s an important point:
If you own the website, there’s no need to estimate. You can install Google Analytics (for free) and see close to exact traffic numbers.
ahrefs blog growth
Ahrefs’ blog growth, via Google Analytics
SIDENOTE. Server log file analysis can provide even more data about your traffic, as explained in this article.
But as you’re reading this article, I’ll hazard a guess that you don’t own the website in question, right?
You’re probably trying to guess how much traffic your competitor gets, and it’s unlikely that they’ll share their Google Analytics with you.
In this post, I’ll run through three ways to get traffic estimates for any website.
Method 1. Use a traffic estimation tool
There are two types of traffic estimation tools:
Tools that estimate total traffic: Visitors to your website can come from all kinds of places: search engines; forums; social media; etc. These tools estimate the total amount of traffic from all sources.
Tools that estimate only organic traffic: Most websites get a good chunk of their traffic from search engines like Google; this is called “organic traffic.” Estimates from these tools don’t take into account traffic from any other sources (e.g., social media) besides organic traffic.
Let’s explore each of these in more detail.
1. Find out how much traffic a website gets in total
Here at Ahrefs, we tried all the leading total traffic telemarketing list estimation tools and did a few small internal experiments to find out which was most accurate, and SimilarWeb won.
SimilarWeb shows a bunch of traffic-related stats, including:
Total visits;
Pages per visit;
Average visit duration;
Bounce rate
SIDENOTE. Learn more about how Similarweb telemarketing list defines and calculates these metrics here, here, here and here.
Here are the traffic estimates for ahrefs.com as of July 2018:
similarweb traffic
Strangely, it doesn’t provide pageview estimates. But these can be reverse engineered by multiplying total visits by pages per visit (for us, this would be 5.63M * 7.5 = 42.23M pageviews).
Free users can also view monthly traffic estimations for up to six months on an interactive graph.
interactive graph similar web
Paying subscribers can see this data for up to two years.
All traffic estimates include both mobile and desktop traffic, and you can segment by device category if you’re a paying subscriber.
Scroll down, and the report shows some more useful traffic-related stats such as traffic by countries (desktop only)…
traffic by countries similarweb
SIDENOTE. Free users can only see stats for the top 5 countries that drive the highest percentage of traffic.
… traffic sources (direct, referrals, search, etc)…
traffic sources similarweb
… top referring sites (this is useful when building links or looking for guest post opportunities that will bring referral traffic!)…
referring sites similarweb
… and top 5 organic keywords…
organic keywords similarweb
Where does the data come from?
To understand the reliability of this data, it’s vital that we know where it comes from.
Here’s what SimilarWeb has to say on the matter:
Our data comes from 4 main sources:
A panel of monitored devices, currently the largest in the industry;
Local internet service providers (ISPs) located in many different countries;
Our web crawlers that scan every public website to create a highly accurate map of the digital world;
Hundreds of thousands of direct measurement sources from websites and apps that are connected to us directly.”
Translation: SimilarWeb get their data from a variety of sources which collect anonymized information about users’ online activity.
They don’t say how big their coverage is, but they don’t get information from everyone in the world. So their data is derived from a relatively small sample of the “online population.”
Is the data accurate?
Let’s test it. Here’s what we did: