Why is website traffic analysis crucial for competitive research?

Website traffic analysis is one of the newest trends in competitor analysis, where we analyze the traffic of the websites of our competitors. This practice gives an idea about the website performance of our competitors, and we can work on that information to improve the performance of our websites. Currently, many tools are available for website traffic analysis to help in our quest. 

What is the importance of traffic analysis?

When talking about website traffic analysis, we can touch upon three primary benefits that include:

• Growth of the traffic volume of your website
• Give a better understanding and clear perspective of new business opportunities.
• Gain a competitive edge over our competitors by getting a clear view of their strategies and tactics. We also get to know about the performance of our competitors with traffic analysis.

Growth

To grow the traffic volume of your website, you don’t need to do anything fancy. You only need to concentrate on the traffic analysis for your competitor’s website. This analysis can pinpoint some critical and valuable opportunities that you may be missing out on right now. There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. It includes emailers, organic searches, cross-promotion, social media, etc. You may be missing out on one of these factors that can be mended. Paid advertisements stressing upon some keywords may be helping your competitor similarly, and you are probably not using those.

Opportunities

Business opportunities can also be identified and capitalized upon. There are many ways traffic analysis can help in this regard. For example, you may be willing to offer a product at a new geographical location. You may get some vital insights by analyzing the website traffic of your competitors. Those who are offering a similar product at that geographic location.

Competitive Edge

The competitive edge that you can gain from website traffic analysis is immense. You can learn from the online marketing strategies of your competitors. When your competitors change their marketing strategy, you will know that instantly and learn how the change affects performance. If these strategies are working well, you can include those in your marketing strategy. You can also find opportunities where none of your competitors are looking into. 

Data points to look out for

Many data points can help you with your analysis, and these can be quite varied as per your needs. However, you may get a good amount of detail and understanding if you touch base upon these data points mentioned below.

• Check the overall website traffic. How the traffic changes over time and how much traffic your competitors are getting.
• Channel-wise traffic to their website. Which online channels contribute how much traffic to your competitors’ websites.
• The traffic your competitors’ websites are getting from different devices like PCs, mobiles, and tabs.
• The geographic distribution of traffic to the websites is also a vital metric in the website traffic analysis.
• Engagement of the audience to the websites. You will need to get this by checking how many pages the audience is visiting and how much time they spend on the websites.
• The demographics of the audience to your competitors’ website is essential. These include age, gender, and interests.
• The ads that your competitor has used include search ads, display network ads, and product listing ads.

Tools that are actually useful

Many software tools operate online and can provide you with all the data you will need. Out of the many tools, some are most widely used and respected. These include the following:

• Google Trends
• Google keyword planner 
• Similarweb
• Google Analytics

When it comes to the cost, the amount that you spend on website traffic analysis should depend on what you want to achieve. If you are planning to invest a serious amount of money into the marketing of your business based on the results of website traffic analysis, you should go for a premium plan and invest significant money monthly. 

To conclude, we can say that website traffic analysis of your competitors is a definite thing to do if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. Businesses will only thrive if they have the proper data fed to them. These data should be used for strategy.