Optimize Your Digital Marketing Strategy

This guide will help you find growth opportunities by learning from the most successful marketing strategies of your competitors.

SimilarWeb will make it easy for you to track marketing growth compared to your competitors, understand if you are applying the right strategy for every marketing channel, and optimize the allocation of your marketing budget.  

Here are the steps we recommend taking to optimize your marketing strategy:

  • Discover the best performing traffic channels based on your competitors and industry
  • Track your competitors’ performance in each channel
  • Find growth opportunities in new geography markets
  • Discover ideas for engaging content


Discover the best performing traffic channels based on your competitors and industry

Analyze your competitors’ digital strategy by looking which channels drive the most traffic to their site across desktop and mobile. Marketing Channels.


  1. Use the search bar to choose the website you want to analyze
  2. Use the COMPARE button on top of the page to add up to 4 additional domains.
  3. On the left-hand menu bar, under “Traffic”, go to Marketing Channels
  4. Analyze Channels Overview to understand which channels your competitors generate traffic from.
  5. Use the # icon to view absolute numbers in order to easily identify which competitors are strongest in different channels. Use the % button to view a percentage to discover the leading channels generating traffic for the site.


Using the filter at the top right of the page, look at different time periods and countries, desktop or mobile web, to understand how your competitors’ strategies have changed over time and if they have different strategies for different target countries and across platforms.


Track competitors performance in each channel

Now that you know where your competitors are getting their traffic from, the next step is to understand how successful each channel is by analyzing the quality of that traffic. This will help you get a sense of how to better allocate your resources.

  1. Stay in the Research section, In the right side menu bar under “Traffic” click Marketing Channels
  2. In the Marketing Channels page, scroll down to Channel Analysis to see changes in volume over time.
  3. For each desktop marketing channel, look through the engagement tabs to see which channel leads to the highest quality traffic. (e.g. a certain domain might have the highest Traffic Share but a low Avg. Visit Duration and Pages / Visit indicating a need to improve the quality of the traffic.  
  4. Look at the Traffic Share compared to your competitors to analyze how much they are investing in each channel.
  5. Track traffic trends in the market over time by using the Compare Box. Look at the Channel Overview graph side by side with Channel Analysis to see the trend in traffic as well as the quality. For example, if you see one of your competitors had a major increase in traffic over a certain period of time, find out if the quality of traffic was also high at that time.



You can use the period compare box to compare changes in traffic due to seasonal changes, holidays, promotions, and/or campaigns.


For an in-depth look at how to optimize your paid campaign, we recommend reading:

How to Optimize Your Display Campaigns

How to Optimize Your Search Campaigns



Find growth opportunities in new geography markets

Analyze the market which your competitors are receiving the most traffic from to gain insight into new potential markets you could target.

  1. Stay in the Research Section in the compare mode. Under “Audience”, go to Geography.
  2. Analyze which countries receive the most traffic by looking at the Traffic Share By Country graph
  3. Find new potential markets by looking at the Traffic Share column. Look at the Competitive Traffic Share column to see how competitive is this market and who is leading in terms of traffic.



If you have seasonal campaigns, analyze the demographics during those dates to see if your competitors are gaining more traffic than you from other countries, then optimize your campaigns accordingly.


Gain ideas for engaging content

Analyzing your competitors’ most successful pages, campaigns, and content.

  1. Stay in the Research section, under “content,” go to Folders
  2. Browse the folders and corresponding share (%) to see the amount of overall traffic that is accounted for by each folder.  Analyzing the traffic share breakdown within specific domains is a great way to see your competitors’ leading offerings and categories.
  3. Under “content,” go to Pages to see what specific pages, content, and campaigns are the most attracting your target audience. Use the “New”, “Trending”, and “Best Performing” filters to see the pages that received the most page views in that time period. You can use the arrow at the right of the URL to view the page.


  • Use the “New” filter to see pages that did not generate any traffic during the previous month, thus keeping track of new pages launched by competitors.
  • Use the “Trending” filter to discover pages that experienced large increases in traffic from the previous month.
  • Use the “Best Performing” filter to discover pages that generate the most overall traffic within the selected time period.


Use the Campaign UTM filter to discover campaigns identified by a URL parameter UTM. 


In order to analyze the topics that generate most of the traffic to your target audience. Read our detailed guide about Mapping your competitive landscape.

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