7 Free Tools for Website Traffic Checkers

Marketers and entrepreneurs need to have a firm grip on their websites. To adjudge the performance of their landing pages and ascertain how the target audience responds to their content. This is vital as a website is one of the most essential digital assets of the company.

A website is a virtual place where the target audience visits and checks your products and services. They even make online purchases using an online payment process and get in touch with the business. All in all, if you wish to get more conversions, it is essential to drive more traffic to your website. For that, you need to get information about the number of people visiting your site and then plan on the way to increase the traffic. 

This is where a reliable tool called a website traffic checker assists you in ascertaining how many people are visiting your landing page and engaging with your content.

With the help of a website traffic checker, you can keep an eye on the activities of your competitors. It can also help you to gauge whether a particular niche works in blogging. You can also get to learn how others are driving traffic.

If you believe it is possible to succeed without knowing what your competitors are doing, then you are wrong. Your business can become less profitable if you don’t learn from others, according to marketing experts from Lentis LLC. So, what are the benefits of getting website traffic information from your competitors? Let’s find that out in the next section.

What makes it Essential to Scrutinize the Website Traffic of Other Sites?

There are some hidden benefits of knowing the website traffic of your competitors. These include:

• Effortless knowledge of daily/monthly visits of any competitor
• Gives you the knowledge of their top keywords that can be targeted to get more traffic on your website
• Makes you comprehend the other traffic sources like a social, organic, referral
• Helps you gain insightful details like bounce rate, page views and time spent on the site

Now the question is whether you can use these tools to learn about your own website’s traffic or other websites’ traffic. Let’s find that out.

Your own traffic vs others' traffic

Let's make an important distinction first. You don't need any special tool to check your own site's traffic. You have Google Analytics for that, and it's amazing. Google will tell you how many visitors you get from different sources: search engines, social media, referrals, AdWords, and so on. 

You can filter the traffic by location and demographics, see where your visitors were before coming to your site, and much else: 

So if you aren't using Google Analytics and Google Search Console yet, you should start doing so ASAP. 

The traffic checkers I'll be talking about in this post have different functions. They are supposed to show you how where other sites get their traffic from.

Why would you need that?
Well, for several reasons:

• See how your site compares to the competition;
• Learn where your rivals get their traffic from;
• Find the best sites to publish backlinks to your page, etc.

Sun Tzu states in the Art of War, “Know your enemy.”
This is exactly what traffic-checking tools can help you with. By analyzing your competitors' traffic, you can position your site better and gain an advantage. But before you get too excited, there's a serious caveat you need to know about.

The Downsides

Online traffic checkers use lots of sources to collect data. These include browser extensions, ISPs, web crawlers, monitored devices, and whatnot. Some of them can be quite shady – especially the extensions.

But in any case, checkers only analyze a very small sample of website visits. Think of it as of a political poll: you ask 1000 people and draw conclusions based on the opinions of the whole population.

As a result, traffic checkers can give you wildly inaccurate estimates. According to Ahrefs, some tools overestimate the number of visitors for over 90% of websites – and by as much as 300%. 

Finally, checkers work well only for popular websites. For smaller pages, they will often refuse to provide any data at all. For example, on the SimilarWeb checker, you'll get a message like this:

Now that you're aware of the drawbacks let's look at the 7 best free tools for checking your competitors' traffic. 

1. SimilarWeb 

If the site is included in their database, SimilarWeb will show you which country is its main source of traffic. You'll also see how it ranks in its specific category.

Next, you'll see the number of visitors and how many pages every user views on average. To get total page views, you need to multiply these two numbers. (It's a bit weird that SimilarWeb doesn't provide this metric by default).

Scroll down, and you'll find a wealth of useful info. The top 5 countries where traffic comes from, key referral sites, traffic from social media by platform… Particularly useful is the traffic source chart: 

The best thing is that it's all free. The paid version is supposed to help you benchmark your site against others and get a peek at your competitors' marketing strategies. 

2. SEMrush

You must register to use SEMrush traffic analytics, but it only takes a moment. A bigger problem is that it only works for large sites. The only part of the analysis you can access for free is the overview. It provides mostly the same data as SimilarWeb, including the number of visitors, visits duration, and the average number of pages viewed per visit:

You can also view traffic by source, the top 5 countries, and the proportion of desktop/mobile traffic for each subdomain:

However, whenever you click on Full Report or any of the advanced tabs, you can buy a premium package. They cost at least $200 per month – not a great option if you are just starting out. 

3. Quantcast 

This checker is supposed to be more accurate than SimilarWeb or SEMrush. There's one issue, though. You must add your own site to the database and install a small tracker. This means that Quantcast only analyzes those sites that have joined its system. If you have a small site competing with other small sites, chances are you won't find them on Quantcast.

The basic data is the same as with other checkers:

Where Quantcast excels is in demographics. You can generate a portrait of an average visitor: their gender, age, income level, ethnicity, and so on.

Quantcast even shows you visitors' interests, occupations, shopping preferences, and political opinions. 

4. Sitechecker

The Traffic Checker tool in Sitechecker lets you check the website traffic stats of any website in the world.

Assuming your competitor’s website receives lots of traffic, the traffic checker tool will return lots of traffic data for that website.

The tool gives you an overview of what the website traffic is. Actually, like many website checker tools, this is an estimate of the website traffic.

It also reveals the website traffic stats by country, engagement, top organic keywords, top paid keywords, referral traffic, social traffic, and top competitors.

5. Open.Trends from Semrush 

Open . Trends from Semrush is the perfect tool for businesses to find out which websites are the most popular within their chosen industry and geo. This tool allows users to easily access data about the most visited sites and analyze them to discover insights about their current competition.

The data provided by Open. Trends in comprehensive and include factors such as the number of visitors, Main Traffic Source, and more. It also offers a variety of metrics for each site in order to provide users with an in-depth look at the website’s performance. With Open. Trends, businesses can get an accurate picture of which sites are driving traffic within their industry and make better-informed decisions about their own strategies

6. SiteWorthTraffic 

This tool gives you something that others don't – an estimate of how much a site earns from ads. You can view daily, monthly, and yearly numbers.

However, SiteWorthTraffic seems to fetch the rest of its data from Alexa:

Though it provides much less data, SiteWorthTraffic is completely free. It doesn't try to sell you expensive subscriptions, and there's no registration.

7. WebsiteTrafficValue

This tool is free to check different stats of any website. The tool quickly estimates global ranking and website worth. The tool gives you estimated visitor numbers, page views, and ad revenue daily, monthly, and yearly.

You can view basic information like a website's title, description, and keywords. It also gives you information on search engine index stats, Facebook likes, and share counts.

WebsiteTrafficValue also provides you with Moz domain authorities and backlinks to the website.

If you are interested in which websites are the most popular and valuable worldwide, you can view a corresponding ranking in the service.

Bottom Line

Whichever tool you choose, don't forget that none of them is 100% correct. They aren't even 90% correct. In fact, all traffic checkers base their calculations on very incomplete data. Try to put in your own site's URL – and then compare what the checker tells you with what you see in your Google Analytics. You'll be surprised by the difference.

Still, checkers are valuable because they show you the general trends – and give you a direction for further research.

Say you find out that a competitor’s site gets many more visitors. In this case, you can ask yourself: is it because their content is more engaging? Do they select their keywords better? Or perhaps they chose faster web hosting with better uptime and thus rank better on Google? 

At the end of the day, competitor analysis is not about perfect accuracy. It's about what you need to do to help your site perform better.

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