Have you ever heard of SEMrush Traffic Analytics? If you haven’t yet, then it’s time for you to find out. Traffic Analytics is part of the SEMrush package – a tool that can greatly help you with your marketing tactics. Those that have been invested with SEO for quite some time might already be familiar with the name SEMrush – but those who haven’t might not know the benefits that can be obtained by using these Traffic Analytics.
What Is SEMrush?
Before you start learning about Traffic Analytics, you first need to understand the basics of SEMrush. SEMrush is a tool that uses digital marketing tactics with the purpose of improving website traffic and leads. SEO by itself can be rather difficult to comprehend. So, when you do not have the tools to understand exactly how SEO works, SEMrush can prove quite helpful in that regard.
To put it plainly, SEMrush is a web application that allows you to evaluate significant amounts of SEO-related data. Not only can you use it to find out more information on your platform, but it may also be used to find information on your competition.
As SEMrush states, the application is connected to a total of 45 million domains and 106 million keywords. By going through those links, they can offer you important information – one example being the keywords that your competition uses to rank high in the search engines. The SEMrush app can also help those that need digital assistance, making it an exceptional choice when you do not have that much knowledge on the matter.
What Are Traffic Analytics?
Traffic Analytics is a competitive research and market intelligence tool that may offer you an estimation of the traffic occurring on a website – no matter if that traffic is coming from mobile or desktop platforms. Part of SEMrush, Traffic Analytics provides complete access to the domain traffic of your competitors.
By using Traffic Analytics, you may analyze the weaknesses and strengths of your competition, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of the market and the chosen niche. By seeing what they are doing right or wrong, you should be able to implement your own strategy based on your competition’s data.
Traffic Analytics is not an add-on that you can get for free. To get to this tool, you first need to pay for a SEMrush subscription plan – and after that, separately purchase Traffic Analytics. A subscription to SEMrush PRO is $99 per month, whereas Traffic Analytics costs $200. As a result, in order to get full advantage of Traffic Analytics, you will have to pay a total of $299.
It’s indeed a high price to pay, but many people believe it to be worth it. If you are not completely certain whether it is worth the investment or not, you can opt for a trial period, but it will only last one week. With that in mind, you still receive full access to everything that is part of the SEMrush subscription, as well as the Traffic Analytics tools.
Where Does SEMrush Get Data From?
SEMrush primarily gets its data from more than 200 million users that have subscribed to the program. It is capable of monitoring the online behavior of every user, including the domains and websites that they go on. By monitoring the Google search results, SEMrush can get quite a high amount of data.
Moreover, SEMrush can invest resources to make their algorithms better, surfacing the data they could find on the platform. The most recent SEMrush algorithm was released at the beginning of 2020.
Traffic Analytics vs. Domain Analytics
Aside from Traffic Analytics, the SEMrush subscription has one more tool that people may use – namely, Domain Analytics. Because of this, people may begin to wonder: what are the actual differences between them? Since both of them pull data from your competition, you might think that they obtain similar data – but the truth is that they are a bit different.
The differences between these two tools lie in exactly how they gather that data. The numbers that are gathered by Domain Analytics are based mostly on the estimated traffic of the website, mixed in with the keyword position. These numbers are determined based on exactly how much traffic a website gets according to their position in the search results – both organic and paid.
On the other hand, Traffic Analytics works by looking at the clickstream data – in other words, the path that every visitor takes once they reach the website. They focus on all the traffic sources of the domain, not just those from searches.
Each Traffic Analytics report will show you an Estimated Accuracy at the top of it. There, you can check the accuracy based on the domain type, as well as on the data available for analyzing the website. You can choose the time frame for the traffic sources, but the standard of the website will show you data over the past 6 months.
Benefits of Traffic Analytics
Traffic Analytics allows you to get the estimates over other domains and compare them to your websites. You are not limited just to one website. For example, you may take your domain and compare it with four others. This should give you a better idea of who is doing a better job of getting traffic and leads. Also, you will be told exactly which technique worked the best in bringing said traffic.
This tool allows you to take visitor engagement metrics, compare them, and see which country or area they got the most traffic from. Overall, Traffic Analytics will provide five highly useful reports:
- Destination Sites
- Traffic Overview
- Geographic Distribution
- Traffic Sources
- Subdomains
Each of these reports will provide a quick insight by using market and competition analysis. To put it simply, by using Traffic Analytics, you should be able to find out where you’re at in comparison to other similar websites.
Features to Use with SEMrush Traffic Analytics
As mentioned, SEMrush Traffic Analytics can provide you with several reports. Used correctly, they can give you an accurate insight into how your website is performing. Here is how you can make good use of this very useful tool:
Overview of Subdomains Report
Traffic Analytics overviews will allow you to find estimates from a website’s traffic so that you can make your comparison. These reports will allow you to see the strategies used by your competitors, analyze the user behavior, as well as unveil the market trends of the moment.
By going to your overview reports, you may see the following estimates in terms of engagement and traffic data for the selected websites. You should be able to see:
- Visits: The number of visits that the website had that month.
- Pages/Visit: The number of pages that a visitor typically goes through during one session on a website.
- Unique Visitors: The number of unique visitors that a website typically has every month
- Bounce Rate: The website’s average bounce rate
- Average Visit Duration: The average timeframe that a visitor typically spends on your website during each session.
The overview will show you a graphic with the data above. The default is set for 6 months, but if you want, you may also set it for yearly reports. This graph is very useful, particularly if you wish to understand seasonal analytics. This way, you should be able to see whether there are any spikes in the traffic depending on the season or not.
Below this graphic, you will see the subdomain and traffic share widgets. The traffic share will show you a report of how many visits you get from the desktop format, and how many of them come from mobile. The subdomain will present a percentage of the total traffic on the domain, as well as the percentage from each type of device (mobile or desktop).
Compare Traffic Statistics
By using Traffic Analytics, you may also benchmark, as well as compare traffic statistics from more websites in one go. All you have to do is to introduce the name of the websites in the “Overview” section and then select “Compare.”
This report will give you traffic statistics of all the websites that you are trying to compare. You may analyze different websites from your competition alone, or you may compare them against your own domain. Below, you can see an Audience Overlap, a widget that will show you how the audience of your competition overlaps with yours.
As you go past the Audience Overlap, you will find the widget for traffic sources. This widget will see and compare the traffic received by each input website – the limit being 5 different traffic sources.
Last but not least, when you compare traffic statistics, you will also see the top 5 countries that send traffic to the selected domain. The selected website will be put in comparison to other similar websites, and see how they perform in their pull for traffic from other countries.
Traffic Sources Report
When you use the traffic sources report, you will find out just how much traffic a website gets based on a variety of digital sources and strategies. Here are the basic sources and tools by which that traffic is calculated:
- Direct: Users are entering the website based on a direct link that they have written down in the search bar, links from an outside browser, or saved bookmarks.
- Referral: Users that are entering the domain by clicking on a hyperlink from another domain. For example, if someone writes a post on their domain in which they recommend your website, they will hyperlink and refer to you.
- Social: Users come upon the domain by clicking on the links on social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, etc.).
- Search: User looks up keywords in a search engine, coming across your website. The traffic source may be from any search engine such as Bing, Google, and so on.
- Paid Ads: The users are coming across the domain by clicking onto the paid ads, whether they are appearing on search engines or social media.
By using this data, you may determine which option is the most successful in gathering traffic, allowing you to customize your SEO strategy accordingly. You’ll be able to find out how to use keywords and how to optimize your website so that it works best with the preferred source.
Geographic Distributions Report
One more very useful tool of Traffic Analytics is the GEO distribution report. Through this, you should be able to identify the countries, as well as the regions from where you get most of your visitors. Traffic Analytics is currently capable of gathering and analyzing traffic from well over 190 countries. You can get access to historical details that have been filtered out for certain devices. It is a report type that is very useful for those whose company has a large international footprint.
Destination Sites Report
The destination site report offers a list of websites that users typically go on after they leave the domain in question. This type of data is unique to SEMrush Traffic Analytics, and cannot be found in other products such as Google Analytics.
This tool is quite helpful when it comes to understanding the behavior of potential visitors. For example, this report might show you that visitors go to the domains of your competition, just because their pages have stronger content than yours. In this regard, it will show you exactly how much you might need to improve on the content.
The Bottom Line
In a time when SEO is essential for every business owner, SEMrush Traffic Analytics can prove to be quite an efficient tool. For a fee, you can get some deep insight into the traffic of a website, comparing it to other similar businesses. This way, you will know whether you are supposed to make any changes or not.