As part of our occasional feature giving readers the low down on new tools for digital marketers to collect insight, in this post we ask Daniel Buchuk from SimilarWeb to introduce their service. SimilarWeb enables companies to benchmark performance against competitors. If you're interested in this process and other tools available, check out our post detailing competitor benchmarking services. 
During the interview, Daniel talks about the story behind SimilarWeb, why their tools are different to those in the marketplace such as Alexa or Compete and the availability of free features.
There's an increasing demand for online competitive intelligence and existing high-end tools in the market are often too complex and unaffordable for the mid market. There are simply no solutions when it comes to traffic insights for countries outside the US. We created a platform that is not only beautiful and easy to use but that also lets international users drill down into the insights they need.
The two things that set us apart are depth of data and usability.
We provide the most extensive list of inbound and outbound referrals, organic and PPC keywords, display insights and a full breakdown of traffic by country. This data you simply can’t get anywhere else. In addition, SimilarWeb PRO shows insights about user behavior on competing sites, which helps marketers understand their best content, conversion rates, popular pages, folders and subdomains.
For example, if you work in the Fashion sector you can benchmark against referral data from different traffic sources.
In terms of usability, as Mark Zuckerberg said, the trick isn’t adding new stuff but taking it away. The world is becoming increasingly data-driven, the amount of data that we process has increased dramatically over the past ten years.
Back then online marketing was doing some email campaigns, buying banners and some link building today it’s SEO, PPC, RTB, Retargeting, Inbound Marketing, Social (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn ,etc) and how they influence each other. Our Product team has done an incredible job of working with marketers to understand what they look for and present our insights in a meaningful way.
Most users fall into two categories: those that use it as a strategic research tool to monitor and benchmark competitor activity and those that take a pure ROI approach and use it as an online marketing resource to optimise their SEO, PPC and Display campaigns. In both cases, SimilarWeb PRO unveils competitive insights that help them make informed decisions about how and where to put their online marketing efforts.
We have the biggest panel in the World for web measurement which is highly representative in Europe, North America, South America, and APAC. Our panel data is then complemented with data from own crawler. The clickstream data we collect is from users who have downloaded our free browser plugins and apps, where they opt-in to anonymously help us measure the web.
The free version of SimilarWeb gives users a quick overview of any site’s reach, ranking and engagement. In terms of referral, search and display data we show the top 10 results as well as the share of traffic from the top 5 countries and social networks. This is the information you will find in the free version:
SimilarWeb PRO gives users the full picture, enabling users to dig deeper and find all the sources of traffic – with full lists of paid and organic keywords, referrals, social links, ad publishers, ad networks, traffic by country and more. Plus there are features such as Popular Pages and Paid Media competitors which are exclusive to SimilarWeb PRO.
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.
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