How to compare website traffic and benchmark against your competitors

Skip to what you need:

• The benefits of tracking and comparing website traffic

• 5 tools to compare competitors' traffic

• 4 ways to get more from your existing website traffic

What is website traffic?

Website traffic is a measurement of the number of visitors to any web page. Traffic is usually recorded using a website tracking tool, like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, which tracks visitors using a JavaScript snippet.

You can track various traffic sources for your own site and competitors’ sites, including search engine, direct, referral, email, and PPC traffic; and traffic metrics, including:

• Pageviews

• Bounce rate

• Traffic source

• Audience demographics

The benefits of tracking and comparing website traffic

By measuring your own and competitors’ web traffic, you can:

• Track your website's growth over time

• Measure seasonal popularity and peaks

• Compare your performance to previous years

• Benchmark your performance against competitors

Comparing website traffic against a key competitor can also help you identify potential areas of growth. For example, if you see a competitor driving significantly more traffic from search engines, it might be a good strategy for you to invest more into SEO (search engine optimization) as a digital marketing channel.

Comparing website traffic: 5 tools to track competitors’ traffic

Since you don’t have the login details to your competitors’ Google Analytics accounts, you’ll have to rely on the next best thing: big data estimates.

Here are five free and premium tools that make comparing website traffic simple.

1. Google Analytics Benchmarking

If you’re still using Universal Analytics (not GA4), you can access industry benchmark reports in Google Analytics.

From your GA dashboard, navigate to Audience > Benchmarking and select your industry, target country (if applicable), and average daily sessions. GA will then generate a benchmark comparison for any date range. For any channel, location, and device, you can compare:

• Number of sessions

• New sessions/users

• Pages per session

• Average session duration

• Bounce rate

Google Analytics won’t give you data on specific competitors, and the number of web properties data is aggregated from depends on how many websites in your niche opted in to anonymous tracking when signing up for GA.

2. Similarweb

Similarweb is a free tool (with an optional Chrome extension) for comparing web traffic on sites you don’t have access to. Enter one or more websites and you’ll see a comparison of:

• Total monthly traffic

• Average visit duration

• Pages per visit

• Bounce rate

• Traffic percentage by country

• Traffic sources

If you sign up and pay, you’ll get access to more data, including category performance benchmarks and the average bounce rate in your niche or industry. Unfortunately, there’s limited data on smaller websites, so Similarweb is only good for comparing traffic against medium to large sites.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a premium SEO and keyword research tool you can use to compare organic search traffic volumes. Enter any domain, subdomain, or URL and you’ll see an estimate of:

• Monthly organic traffic

• Traffic value (organic + PPC)

• Traffic by country

• Organic keywords

• Referring domains

• Backlinks

You can also view traffic estimates of the top-ranking results for any keyword, which helps you estimate how much traffic to expect for similarly targeted pages on your own site.

Ahrefs is a premium tool and competitor data can only be viewed with a paid subscription. Since it only covers organic search engine traffic, you’ll need a different tool to compare traffic from other sources.

4. Alexa

Alexa is a premium competitor analysis tool, but you can view limited traffic and benchmark data for free without signing up. Enter any domain and you’ll see:

• Percentage of search traffic

• Average bounce rate

• Competitor average bounce rate

• Top keywords and opportunities

• Alexa rank

• Audience geography

Alexa will automatically work out who your competitors are based on audience and search term overlap. There are no pageview estimates, but you’ll get an Alexa Rank score representing a site’s traffic relative to other sites (the lower the number, the higher the traffic).

Like SimilarWeb, Alexa has limited data on smaller websites, and figures on sites with an Alexa Rank of 100,000 or higher are only rough estimates.

5. Semrush

Semrush is a premium marketing tool, but you can generate ten traffic analytics reports by creating a free account.

Enter any domain or compare up to five websites and you’ll get an estimate for:

• Visits

• Unique visitors

• Average visit duration

• Bounce rate

Semrush uses clickstream data to estimate traffic metrics for all websites. For traffic comparisons, you’ll see an estimated accuracy score (high, medium, or low). Semrush’s free data is very limited, and you’ll need to pay for any more than what we’ve shown in the above screenshots.

What traffic comparisons won’t tell you

Comparing website traffic will never be 100% accurate since you’re looking at estimates, not real analytics data. For example, the average estimated bounce rate for Hotjar.com was wildly different depending on the tool we used, ranging from 26.2% in Alexa to 60.93% in Semrush.

Even your own traffic data will never tell you how people are experiencing your website. Are they getting stuck? Does your messaging resonate? Do they trust you enough to become paying customers? You can get more business value by answering these questions instead of just focusing on increasing traffic.

4 ways to get more from your website traffic

Instead of focusing on traffic stats and hoping that more visitors will lead to more conversions (spoiler: it won’t), here are four methods you can use right now to get value from the traffic you already have.

1. Ask your users for feedback

While traffic analytics tells you what is happening on your website, user feedback tells you why. Feedback from users helps you find out what's important to them, so you can use this insight to boost conversions, improve user experience, and lower drop-offs.

You can collect feedback from both website visitors and product users logged in to your platform. For example, Hotjar’s Feedback widget lets users tag any page element with a love-to-hate reaction and add their comments.

2. See how people interact with individual pages

Aside from being boring to look at, traffic data only shows your most and least popular pages. You can see exactly what happens on those pages with two key product experience insight tools: heatmaps and session recordings.

Heatmaps give you a visual overview of how people interact with an individual website page by displaying 'hot' and 'cold' spots, helping you spot trends and optimization opportunities to drive more engagement where you want it.

Session recordings reconstruct individual users’ journeys across every page they visit so you can observe how they navigate, what they click on or ignore as they browse, and whether they encounter any issues along the way:

3. Create your own benchmarks

Instead of comparing website traffic against competitors, you can learn more about how your business is performing by creating your own benchmarks.

In addition to website traffic, you can benchmark user sentiment with surveys like:

Net Promoter Score® (NPS), which measures how likely customers and users are to recommend you to others on a scale from 0 to 10

• CSAT

• CES (Customer Effort Score)

4. Optimize the customer journey

Customer journey maps (CJM) give you a visual overview of how people interact with your website, product, or business, showing the positive and negative interactions that lead to a sign-up or purchase.

Even a basic CJM (like our sticky note map above) puts you in different users’ shoes so you can empathize with their pain points and happy moments and optimize for more joy and less frustration across the experience.

You can create an effective customer journey map in just a couple of days by combining traffic analytics data with insight from the heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys we covered above.