How To Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets

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There are numerous reasons you might want to find out how much traffic a website gets. Perhaps you are interested in researching websites that compete in the same niche as a website you own. Maybe you are considering starting a new website, and you want to research the niche to see if there is enough interest in the topic for your new website to be viable. Perhaps you want to grow the traffic to a website that you own. Maybe you’re curious about how much traffic some of the big media publishers’ websites get.

When I visit a website for the first time, I don't look the design; look at something else. In less than few seconds, I get a estimate of how much traffic that website gets which helps me decide whether or not to stay.

Knowing how much traffic a website gets help me validate the website’s content and let me know how much traffic I need to get to see similar results.

Here are My 7 favorite techniques for figuring out how much traffic a particular website gets.

1. Alexa
The Alexa Ranking isn’t exactly “little-known,” but it is the best-known metric for ranking websites. Alexa tracks stats for everyone who has the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, which accounts for less than 1% of internet users. So it’s not very accurate, but it’ll give you a rough idea of the website’s popularity.




Alexa data is not completely accurate, because it involves flawed methodology. Alexa ranks websites based on how much traffic they get from users who have chosen to install the Alexa toolbar. Alexa toolbar users are a small minority of website users, which makes the data somewhat skewed. However, basic Alexa data is free to the public and easy to obtain, and it does give you insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

2. Compete.com
Compete.com is a web traffic analysis service of Compete, Inc. which operates in the United States and publishes the approximate number of U.S. visitors to the top 1,000,000 web sites.

Based on checking my sites and Income Diary, the “Unique Visitors” stat that it generates is much lower than the actual traffic.

3. SimilarWeb.com
SimilarWeb is another website traffic checker that’s similar to Alexa and Compete, except, it’s got a lot more detail put into it, so it’s more accurate!

The main takeaway is that it gives you a line graph with values for the number of daily unique visitors and the sources. You can see the countries that your traffic comes from, top referring sites, the top destination sites (sites people visit after yours), display ads, audience interests, and up to 10 organic keywords with the free version.

4. comScore.com Reports
comScore is an American global media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to many of the world's largest enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers.

Comscore publishes a number of different traffic reports. Their reports tend to cover only the largest publishers, and they include metrics by country for websites with the highest traffic numbers. This can be useful if you are interested in learning about how much traffic the most prominent websites on the Internet are generating.

5. Traffic Estimates by TrafficEstimate.com
This free resource gives you a bunch of data in one place, although some of it is inaccurate. You’ll be able to find out some basic Alexa rankings, keyword phrases the website is targeting, other websites targeting similar keyword phrases and websites with close relationships.

If you’re researching smaller or newer websites, you might not get any results from this tool. The closely related websites report is flawed; in some cases it does find closely related sites, but in other cases the sites it shows are all unrelated.

6. quantcast.com
Quantcast is an American technology company, founded in 2006, that specializes in audience measurement and real-time advertising.

Quantcast offers you a multiple opportunities to discover a website’s traffic measures. If you are interested in finding out metrics for your own website, you can subscribe to their services to receive detailed insights.

Quantcast also offers website owners the choice to make selected analytics data publicly available. Many website owners take advantage of this because they think it benefits them to show potential advertisers their site’s metrics as verified by an unbiased, trusted third-party source. So you can check to see if the website you are interested in researching has a public Quantcast profile available.

7. searchmetrics.com
The Searchmetrics Suite for enterprise companies is the global leader in SEO marketing and analytics, SEO optimization, social and content marketing.

Similar to SEMRush, Searchmetrics will show you the organic search visibility for a website and also some of their top keyword terms.

Unless the owner of the website reveals exactly how much traffic they’re getting, every other figure is a best guess. Most tools are surprisingly inaccurate when it comes to generating stats. They are good, however, for comparing yourself against others.

Do you know of any other ways to figure out how much traffic a website gets?


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