{"id":2417,"date":"2018-07-11T00:42:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T00:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.socialpatterns.com\/?p=2417"},"modified":"2018-07-11T00:42:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-11T00:42:00","slug":"are-traffic-estimator-tools-accurate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/contentcreationv4.local\/are-traffic-estimator-tools-accurate\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Traffic Estimator Tools Accurate?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Ever wondered how much traffic a competitor gets? Well, there are many web traffic estimator\u00a0tools<\/a> available. But the question is – are these tools accurate in predicting a website’s traffic?<\/p>\n Since there are many ways to measure website traffic<\/a> (sources, page views, visits, etc), it makes sense to first define what we are referring to when we talk about \u201cwebsite traffic\u201d.<\/p>\n Obviously, there are many sources of traffic. However, for our concerns, there are two main types of website traffic to look at when spying on competitors:<\/p>\n When looking at traffic estimation tools, you\u2019ll often you’ll see a mix of paid traffic and organic traffic from a website. Other times, you\u2019ll see only organic traffic. It usually just depends on the niche or website (whether they doing CPC).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For my purposes on gaining insight into my competitors from an SEO standpoint, or SEO analysis of my own sites, I will primarily look at organic traffic. This is because my main focus is on SEO and content marketing.<\/p>\n Since we are mainly focusing on the organic traffic, now the question is \u2013 how are these website traffic estimators actually measuring<\/em> the traffic?<\/p>\n Remember there are many units of measurements<\/a> when referring to website traffic:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When playing around with Google Analytics, you probably are baffled at the countless many ways in which you can measure and sort your website\u2019s traffic data.<\/p>\n One of the most common ways to measure traffic is simply to measure the number of visitors to your website, within a given time period (like monthly visits)<\/em>.<\/p>\n When using website traffic estimator tools, they typically show you the number of visitors on a website, in a given month. The equivalent metric in Google Analytics is Users<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When you use Google Analytics you have access to a ton of data. You can see how many people are visiting your website, from where and how they’re behaving on your website.<\/p>\n But when we do competitor analysis, we obviously don\u2019t have access to their Analytics data. With traffic estimator tools we typically are limited to just seeing the number of visitors within a given month<\/em>, with the exception of some tools like similar web, which shows a bit more data.<\/p>\n However, for the purposes of competitor analysis, the monthly visits is usually all you really need. When doing research into another website\u2019s traffic, we don’t necessarily need to know the pageviews and all the other stuff. We simply want to see how many visitors a website has and the keywords associated with that traffic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let’s do a quick test with Google Merchandise Store Demo Account Data<\/a>\u00a0to see if we can match up real traffic from Google Analytics and compare it to these traffic estimators.<\/p>\n This analytics data is provided by Google and it is actual real-world analytics data. Google offers this to the public as a learning tool for Google Analytics. The traffic is from Google’s Merchandise Shop<\/a>\u00a0and the time period is the last 30 days.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Actual Analytics Traffic: <\/strong>56,295 Users<\/p>\n I chose this because it has a decent amount of traffic site, and it is publicly accessible analytics data (so you can play around with it as well). The reason we want to test on decently higher traffic sites is that, typically, the higher the traffic on the site, the more accurate these website traffic estimators will be. However, if the site gets a lot of traffic, then the measurements seem to vary between tools. So we want a happy medium – not too small of a site, and not too large, to test the accuracy.<\/p>\n Ideally, we would want to test several sites to get a better understanding of which is the most accurate website traffic estimators. There was actually a blog post<\/a> that screaming frog did, which included testing a variety of websites. Their testing of 3 tools (SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, SEMrush) found that:<\/p>\n In my test, Alexa actually did the best. And that’s using the free Alexa extension. The second closest was SimilarWeb, just like screaming frog found.<\/p>\n But does that mean these are the best tools for the job? In my opinion, no. Not necessarily.<\/strong><\/p>\n Are most of the website traffic estimator tools accurate? The short answer is no. The long answer is: I am less concerned with accuracy as much as I am concerned with the of relative accuracy. If that doesn’t make sense, keep reading.<\/p>\n Let’s get one fact straight. None of these traffic estimation tools are going to be 100% accurate. The reason for this is because the only tool that will give you an exact traffic number is through server logs or an analytics tool like Google Analytics.<\/p>\n However, when we are doing competitor research \u2013 looking into someone else\u2019s website, we obviously don\u2019t have access to their analytics data. That is proprietary information that they would not want to share.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Well, they\u00a0estimate\u00a0<\/em>traffic, using a variety of inputs.<\/p>\n The way most of these tools\u00a0estimate traffic is by typically creating a mathematical estimation based on the following<\/a>:<\/p>\n So the lesson is, that each traffic estimator tool will have their own proprietary mathematical calculation based on their own chosen datasets (which may not be exact in its own regard). As such, we have to look at the data from each different company as a relative scale.<\/p>\n What I mean by that is, every tool, whether it\u2019s a keyword volume tool like Google keyword planner, or if its Google Trends, or a website traffic estimation tool \u2013 each tool is going to have a different scale<\/em> to measure that data.<\/p>\n The united states use inches, but most other countries use the metric system (mm & cm). This is how I view different website estimator tools – it’s just a different unit of measurement.<\/p>\n If we check a facebook.com’s traffic on Ahrefs and then checked youtube.com’s on Similar web, we will get confusing results. However, if you check facebook.com on Ahrefs and youtube.com on Ahrefs as well, we now start to see a relative scale. So the trick is to only use one tool when measuring traffic<\/p>\n This is how you should use and understand these website traffic estimator tools, keyword volume tools, etc. You can only compare inches to inches, not inches to centimeters.<\/p>\n So what’s the lesson in all this? The lesson is to choose the website traffic estimation tool you like the most. Whatever tool fits your needs – maybe you need a comprehensive SEO toolset like Ahrefs, SEMrush<\/a> or Serped.net<\/a>. Maybe you would rather try free options like the Alexa extension. The point is, choose what you’re comfortable with and only use that tool for traffic comparisons.<\/p>\n Just don’t fool yourself into believing that what you’re seeing is actual true website traffic. Remember – its just an estimation of traffic, calculated by different variables.<\/p>\n However, if you did want to get close to the true website traffic numbers, a great free option is the Alexa extension.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever wondered how much traffic a competitor gets? Well, there are many web traffic estimator\u00a0tools available. But the question is – are these tools accurate in predicting a website’s traffic? Defining Traffic Since there are many ways to measure website traffic (sources, page views, visits, etc), it makes sense to first define what we are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[35],"yoast_head":"\nDefining Traffic<\/h2>\n
Two main types of Traffic<\/h3>\n
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Units of Measurement<\/h3>\n
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Users per month<\/h3>\n
How accurate are traffic estimator tools?<\/h2>\n
My findings<\/h3>\n
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Screaming Frog Study<\/h3>\n
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It’s about the relative accuracy<\/h2>\n
How do these “traffic estimator” tools work?<\/h2>\n
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In conclusion<\/h2>\n