How To Check ANY Website’s Traffic For FREE

Ever wondered just how well your competitors site is doing? Are they getting more visitors than you? Are they targeting different people than you?

Unless your competitor has an “advertising” page that displays their monthly impressions we are going to have to rely on good old traffic estimator sites.

Luckily there are a few that do this pretty well and best of all for free. 

1. Similar Web

Similar web helps you get detailed data from different sites and gives you a comprehensive overview of how a website is ranked. From this, you get to see how the website is ranked globally, countrywide and according to its category.

Similar Web breaks down the data into easily digestible chunks which makes the whole process fast. They also offer a tier paid membership starting from $199 per month to $799.

Referrals

An easy to read diagram of the top referring sites, also included is the top sites that leave similar web.

Search Traffic

Probably the most important section for many. Those keywords your competitor is targeting, the organic traffic and PPC visits.

Display Advertising

If your competitor is running display advertising “banner ads” you can find the data here.

Content

Here we can see which subdomain, folder and even page is the most popular. Very useful!

Audience

This data should match your own if its a direct competitor, pay attention to the tags and see if there’s any your not targeting

Competitors

It’s always a good idea to know just who your competitors are, similar web makes this an easy process.

Mobile Apps

If the website has a mobile app it will show up here.

2. Quantcast

Quantcast breaks down each report into 10 different categories.

It has been named to be the most accurate site providing traffic estimation tool; its main aim is to provide the behavior of visitors on a website. The website is able to measure things like gender, how long and their frequency on certain pages as well as the visitors age. One of the benefits you will get from this site is that you can track data in real time, this is an important tool as you can monitor changes that you might make on your site and see the impacts.

Quantcast requires that you sign up and place a tracking code on your own website to access its data. Well worth it in my opinion, especially for those who run advertising campaigns and need a better understanding of the type of visitors viewing the website you will be running ADS on.

Demographics

This data is invaluable when running ads on a website, here we can see that lifehacker is popular with young asian dads who are educated and earn a nice income.

Cross-platform

Running desktop advertising on Lifehacker? You may want to consider mobile only as we can see over 75% of visitors are using their smart phone.

Engagement

Quantcast breaks down the data even further by showing us how engaged each visitor is.

Shopping Interests

Here we can view the shopping habits of visitors of lifehacker, currently viewing the retail purchase affinity report.

Media Interests

Media interest data can be broken down further by streaming devices, movies, music & entertainment.

Business & Occupation

Find out which sector your visitors are working with, their revenue and industry.

General Interests

One of my favorite reports on quantcast. Here I can find out what visitors like and which websites they have visited.

Geographic

Top countries visiting lifehacker, can break this data down further into cities.

Politcal Interests

Self explanatory, this report breaks down any political interests visitors may have.

Verdict

Quantcast is honestly a must have tool for webmasters looking to get an edge on the competition. Even if you dont have your own domain but run affiliate ads via media buying you should really have access to this if you want to convert those impressions. It does require that you sign up and have access to your own domain however.

3. Alexa

The oldest and first real traffic estimator tool, Alexa Internet has been around since 1996. Originally it was set up to help users find similar websites they may like via a toolbar installed on their web browser.

This toolbar allowed alexa the ability to crawl and archive millions of websites and visitor browsing habits (eventually leading to the creation of the internet archive).

Alexa has sadly been taken over in terms of features by sites offering more accurate data for free. Currently you can find out a websites audience geography, engagements, top keywords, bounce rate and backlinks. Paid membership grants you more access to data starting at $149.

Alexa Rank

Here we have a very basic look at the “alexa” rank over the past 12 months and the sites global and local rank.

Geography

The top 5 locations that visit lifehacker. If we compare it to the quantcast data we can see the top 4 locations are the same.

Engagement

Alexa keeps it simple with just three data points, bounce rate, page views per visitor and average time on site.

Search Traffic

I would take alexas search traffic data with a dump truck full of salt, we can see the top keywords are very generic and most likely incorrect.

Backlinks

Its free data so I guess we shouldn’t complain, but the “top” 5 backlinks for lifehacker are rather lackluster.

Verdict

It was once a fantastic tool but has seen a huge decline in what it offers for free. Alexa pro starts at price $149, and in my opinion you could get a lot more relevant data from a platform such as SEMrush or Ahrefs.

4. Traffic Estimate

A simple website that gives out basic information on any website. It seems to grab data by combining other sources and spitting out the results. The traffic pulled for lifehacker seems to be on the low side and the top “keywords” seem to be random and unrelated.

Keywords

Verdict

It’s free and only takes a few seconds to check a competitors website, the chance of finding any data the others haven’t? slim

Final Thought

Before going into this I must admit I thought Alexa would still be on top but after seeing what similar web has to offer its clear they are the winner in terms of accessibility and data. Not only is the service free to access its also pretty accurate*.

Getting a rough estimate of another websites traffic in your niche can help you increase traffic and dominate, something every company should monitor.

It makes me wonder whats going on with Alexa internet? Being owned by amazon I thought they would be displaying much more data. Do they not have access to amazon shoppers, fire, kindle and the hugely successful amazon echo owners.

* Third party traffic estimator sites can never be 100% accurate

Mark West

Digital marketing specialist with over 10 years experience in SEO and advertising. Currently working with traffic masters. I love all things digital, self confessed data nerd.