Similarweb Review: What This Heavy-Duty Platform Offers

Running a business and all it entails is tough. But, arguably, staying ahead of your competitors by maintaining a robust online presence is one of the biggest challenges any entrepreneur will face. 

That's why tracking your website's performance is imperative. Fortunately, there are many website tracking tools out there. These can help you check your own website’s performance and that of your competitors, including web and app activity and SEO. 

Similarweb is one such website traffic tool, and that’s what we’re looking at in this review. 

Here, we’ll give you the low down on:

• What Similarweb does
• Similarweb's core features
• Similarweb's prices
• Similarweb's pros and cons
• Our final verdict on the platform

So, time to get our spyglass out and take a look:

Similarweb Review: What Does Similarweb Do?

Launched in 2007 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Similarweb is basically a digital intelligence software platform that enables its users to track their:

• Website and app traffic
• Page performance
• Keyword performance
• Audience metrics

…and more.

On top of that, Similarweb offers data on over 100 million websites and 4.7 million mobile apps across more than 210 industries. As such, as well as tracking their own websites, companies can use SimilarWeb’s market intelligence to gather information about their:

• Competitors
• Customer behavior
• Market research
• Sales and investment opportunities 

It's also worth noting that Similarweb retrieves data cache from a panel of hundreds of millions of web users. In fact, some say that this is the most extensive panel on the market. SimilarWeb utilizes this collective internet activity alongside web crawlers, external providers, contributory networks, and public data sources to provide first-rate market intelligence.

At the time of writing, Similarweb boasts some pretty impressive customers, including the likes of Google, Amazon, Walmart, Booking.com, Adobe, Adidas, and The Economist. 

In summary, Similarweb is a web analytics platform that offers data intelligence in the following areas:

• Digital research: this includes customer behavior, information on the customer journey, audience analysis, benchmarking, and company research
• Digital marketing: this includes competitor analysis, ad research, optimizing for affiliate opportunities, keyword analysis and optimization, and media buying. 
• Sales intelligence: this includes sales engagement, lead enrichment, fraud detection, and lead generation.
• Investor intelligence: this includes alternative data and stock intelligence
• Shopper intelligence: this includes an analysis of shopper behavior, consumer demand, and info about on-site search optimization.

Similarweb Review: Similarweb's Core Features

Now that we've covered the basics, let’s explore Similarweb's features in more detail:

Digital Research

Digital research enables you to explore industry trends, check out how your competitor’s websites and apps are performing, and better understand your target audience's online behavior. 

In short, you get 360° visibility over global market trends, including access to real-time data collated either daily, monthly, or yearly. You can also retrieve info about domains, subdomains, folders, and page-level analytics. Not to mention, you can generate custom reports to view the information most relevant to your strategies. Moreover, you can access all of this via one centralized, easy-to-view dashboard. 

In addition, you can benchmark yourself against your competition by comparing data on monthly site visits, visit duration, bounce rate, and device split (mobile vs. desktop). Not to mention, when researching competitors, you can see their web and app performance and any changes to their paid advertising, market share expansion, or digital revenue. 

Digital Marketing

You can conduct keyword research to discover traffic-generating and trending keywords. Digging deeper into your keyword research is easy as you can base your search on search volume, click rates, paid vs organic clicks, competition, etc. All of this info goes a long way to up your SEO (Search engine optimization) game.

You can also identify new referral opportunities, and qualify potential affiliate partners by analyzing their traffic by:

• Engagement
• Channel
• Performance
• Audience interest 

To optimize your marketing budget, you can use Similarweb to identify your industry's top networkers and ad publishers. This goes a long way to ensuring you spend your marketing budget in the right places.

You can also see which competitor ads perform the best and gain inspiration for your own landing pages, CTAs, and brand messaging. 

In addition, you can compare yourself against competitors to see how your display advertising, organic searches, paid searches (PPC), referrals, and email marketing is fairing.  

Sales Intelligence Tool

This is a valuable tool for sales teams because it provides an insight into prospects’ digital strategies and performance. 

For example, your sales team can see from a single dashboard:

• The countries prospects come from
• Who the top contacts are
• Which payment technologies prospects use
• Data on monthly website visitors

You'll also unlock access to the phone and email contact details of around 400 million decision-makers, as well as basic information about their organization. For instance, headcount, revenue, location, and more. 

Lastly, it's worth noting that Similarweb has a colossal database comprising over 100 million websites. Not to mention, you can refine your search using over 50 filters to find new sales opportunities and monitor prospects. 

Investor Intelligence

If you're an analyst, portfolio manager, managing director, or data scientist, Similarweb's investor intelligence may come in handy. Not least because this platform makes it easy to track company and sector performance, validate investment hypotheses, kickstart investment ideation, and grow your portfolio company.

More specifically, you can create an ‘investment watchlist' and receive alerts of digital signals that could impact the state of your current/potential investments. 

You'll also have access to a ‘deal sourcing engine,' which is designed to help you spot emerging players and investment trends. Comparative benchmarking is also made simple and works wonders for providing context to the performance of different companies. 

On top of that, you'll also get access to sector analysis tools that enable you to better understand broader investment trends, outlier performers, and so on. Also, if you're looking to invest in apps, you'll be please to hear there's an app analysis tool to help qualify prospective apps. Here, you can access the app's ranking, audience interests, traffic sources, engagement, and retention rates.

Shopper Intelligence

For anyone selling online, Similarweb‘s shopper intelligence may come in useful. For starters, you can gauge consumer demand by tracking product categories, brands, and product performance. With this info to hand, you'll benefit from an accurate idea of what consumers are buying.

You'll also be able to analyze online shopper behavior by monitoring omnichannel shopping trends, purchase frequency, and consumer loyalty. Shopper Intelligence uses real consumer browsing and buying data – so you can rest easy knowing the info you're receiving is 100% accurate. Needless to say, this makes it much easier to identify the potential for growth and, more importantly, potential threats to your business.

Similarweb Review: Is Similarweb Data Reliable?

In short, yes. 

Earlier, we mentioned that Similarweb uses several data sources, most notably a massive panel of global internet users. 

That said, let's dig a little deeper into these data sources:

• Direct first-party data: This comes from people willingly sharing their internet activity with SimilarWeb. 
• External data providers: SimilarWeb partners and draws data from companies boasting millions of subscribers
• Contributory networks: Similarweb uses anonymous data collected from contributory networks. However, this data is anonymous because it's taken from the website level, not individual devices. As such, it lacks Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
• Public data: Similarweb engages its own indexing engines to crawl vast caches of public online data.

A bit of digging around the internet tells us the pros believe that these four data sources (along with other tests) indicate that Similarweb's data is sufficiently accurate enough to estimate a website’s traffic size over time and conduct decent website comparisons. 

Similarweb Review: Similarweb Prices

Prices vary depending on the tools you're looking to access:

If you're looking to purchase research intelligence, there's a free plan and a paid-for plan.  

Free version: This plan offers a limited range of features:

• One user
• Limited access to historical website and app data

Research Intelligence Premium Plan: You need to talk to a Similarweb expert to ask for a custom price. But what we do know is that this plan offers the following features:

• Multiple users
• Global and country-level data
• Up to three years of historical data
• Industry analysis
• Company analysis
• App analysis
• Audience analysis
• Conversion analysis
• Segments analysis
• Excel export and dashboards
• API access

Digital Marketing Intelligence: There are three pricing plans to choose from. You can opt for monthly or annual billing. You'll enjoy a 16% saving if you opt for the latter. The prices below are based on monthly billing:

1. Essential: $249 a month
2. Advanced: $449 a month
3. Ultimate: Custom pricing

All plans provide access to: 

• Competitive analysis tools
• Keyword research tools
• Affiliate research tools
• Media buying research tools
• Ad creative research tools

However, the more expensive the plan, the higher the limits on:

• Website page results shown in any given reports
• Keyword results
• Ad creatives
• Historical data

Sales Intelligence: You'll have to contact Similarweb for a custom quote.

Investor Intelligence: Again, you'll have to contact Similarweb for a custom quote.

You can pay for your Similarweb subscription with Mastercard, Visa, AMEX, and Discover.

Similarweb Review: Similarweb Pros and Cons

We've covered lots of information here, so let's wrap things up with a quick pro-cons list:

Similarweb's Pros:

Similarweb Review: Our Final Thoughts

Needless to say, Similarweb has a lot to offer. The research and digital marketing intelligence are incredibly comprehensive, providing everything you need to get an accurate feel of what's going on in your sector. 

More specifically, you can benchmark your website against your competitors to get an insight into what you're doing right and, more importantly, what you can do to improve. Not only that, but online marketers can use Similarweb to identify traffic-generating keywords, referral opportunities, ad network performance, and so much more.

On a slightly different note, if you're a salesperson or managing a sales team, it's worth bearing in mind that at the time of writing, over 100,000 sales professionals are already using Similarweb to find prospects and retain their current business. When it comes to sales, the ability to narrow down audiences to improve lead quality goes a long way to increase the likelihood of achieving those much-coveted sales. 

Lastly, investors can use Similarweb to base their decisions on a prospective company's financials and digital presence. Not to mention, find and monitor tons of potential investments, all from an easy-to-use dashboard. 

So, that brings us to the end of our Similarweb review – what's your verdict? Do you think Similarweb is the right platform for you, or are you considering one of their competitors like SEMRush? Feel free to tell us your thoughts in the comments box below!