Website traffic measurement and rankings: competitive intelligence tools examination

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine and verify the competitive intelligence tools Alexa and SimilarWeb, which are broadly used for website traffic data estimation. Tested tools belong to the state of the art in this area. Design/methodology/approach The authors use quantitative approach. Research was conducted on a sample of Czech websites for which there are accurate traffic data values, against which the other data sets (less accurate) provided by Alexa and SimilarWeb will be compared. Findings The results show that neither tool can accurately determine the ranking of websites on the internet. However, it is possible to approximately determine the significance of a particular website. These results are useful for another research studies which use data from Alexa or SimilarWeb. Moreover, the results show that it is still not possible to accurately estimate website traffic of any website in the world. Research limitations/implications The limitation of the research lies in the fact that it was conducted solely in the Czech market. Originality/value Significant amount of research studies use data sets provided by Alexa and SimilarWeb. However, none of these research studies focus on the quality of the website traffic data acquired by Alexa or SimilarWeb, nor do any of them refer to other studies that would deal with this issue. Furthermore, authors describe approaches to measuring website traffic and based on the analysis, the possible usability of these methods is discussed.

Efficient customer relationship management systems for online retailing: The investigation of the influential factors

“…Investigating the website of rivals Adidam, Gajre, and Kejriwal (2009), Rapp, Agnihotri, and Baker (2011), Stuenkel (2021), Prantl and Prantl (2018), Shi, Mou, and Wan (2009), Chen, Chau, and Zeng (2002), Boncella (2003) Position of rivals in the shared market…”

Online Museums Segmentation with Structured Data: The Case of the Canary Island’s Online Marketplace

“…The first stage of the conversion funnel, i.e., attraction, will be measured with one of the most efficient consumption metrics to measure brand awareness: traffic generation. Through this metric, it is also possible to know the number of visits to a website and its significance [45,47]. Measurement of visitor statistics, according to [44], is a core activity for any business.…”

“…Measurement of visitor statistics, according to [44], is a core activity for any business. Although there are several techniques for collecting a website's traffic data, we will use the one in which data is provided directly by internet service providerswebmasters [47]. Using this technique is a great advantage since the traffic of a large number of websites can be collected on the same site [48].…”

A novel research method to measure the usage of web-based information

“…The literature of estimating web traffic is based on retrieving data from popular directories, such as Alexa [14] , Compete [17] , or SimilarWeb [14] . In other words, many popular websites (web-directories) provide their users with such data.…”