It’s Been a Heck of a Year – Recap of Similarweb Features Released in 2014

It has been a very busy year for Similarweb, with new features coming out just about every month, and the expansion onto new frontiers of digital measurement with Mobile Web and Mobile Apps.

Our mission is to measure the entire digital world by providing actionable insights for our users. So far, we’ve been fulfilling our goals and I’m excited to share the news about these features and product updates with you as they come out.

After spending the year blogging and tweeting about all these great new updates, I think it’s time to take a look back at the new Similarweb features we released in 2014 – including some of my personal favorites.

How We Got Here: The Road So Far

What is probably our most important update, and also the most recent one, is ‘Mobile App Analysis’. We’ve been working hard on creating the same user experience you enjoy when analyzing a competitor’s website – but for a mobile app.

The first 2 mobile features that were released this year were the free Mobile App Analysis section, located on our Website Analysis results page, and the free Mobile App Ranking feature.

Free Mobile App Analysis

Mobile App Analysis feature on Similarweb began as a section on our Website Analysis result page, providing stats about apps on Google Play and the Apple App Store.

But this was just the beginning. What started out as a small section soon turned into a full-fledged App Analysis results page of its own, providing Similarweb users, free access to valuable competitive analysis information for apps.

Our free App Analysis Features includes ranking per country, traffic sources, referring keywords, similar apps and related websites.

Free App Ranking

The second app-related feature we’ve released this year was the free Mobile App Ranking page. On this page you can easily navigate between Google Play and App Store apps ranking (1), including iPad and iPhone (5). You can also filter between countries (2) and categories (3) and find the top-ranked apps under Top Free, Top Paid, Top Grossing, Top New Free, and Top New Paid (4).

Advanced Mobile App Analysis

We’ve also released many existing advanced mobile analysis features on our platform: Mobile Web, Advanced Mobile App Analysis, Google Play Keywords, the Search positioning graph and Top Apps. All of these features provide unique information about competitors’ apps, including – identifying their traffic sources, tracking their rank over time and seeing which keywords directed traffic to them from inside the store and from search engines. On top of this, our App Analysis features offer a bird’s-eye view on the mobile app world, with an easy search tool for leading apps under each store, country or category. This also includes deep analysis per keyword, identifying the top Android apps getting traffic for a specific keyword and the top keywords generating traffic under a specific category and/or country, with data showing stats from the past 6 months.

Last 28 Days filter

This specific feature changed the way we look at competitive analysis. We are now able to spot trends and changes as they happen. The Last 28 Days feature has allowed us to share with our blog readers stories like ‘Top Recent Hashtags on Twitter’, Ello’s sadden rise in popularity and my personal favorite – the Taylor Swift and Spotify fallout.

Data Going Back 25 Months

The 25 Months of data feature gave our users the ability to run YoY comparisons to gain better insights into market trends and traffic changes for any competitor’s website.

Website and App Side-by-Side Comparisons

The ‘Compare Websites Traffic‘ feature for the platform came out in early January and was made available on our Advanced Website Analysis tools. Since then we’ve added the ‘Compare’ feature to our free Website and App Analysis results pages, as well as our Advanced App Analysis features on Similarweb platform. We’ve recently released another related feature that lets you save to favorites your comparisons.

Tools for Paid Search Traffic

These two features have earned us gushing compliments from our PPC users and has prompted yours truly start a new tradition – Hug the developer day! The first feature includes easy access from any referring keyword to its main ad, including other keywords targeted by this ad. I don’t have to explain how valuable this kind of information is – you don’t only see your competitor’s top-paid keywords, but you can also see which ads your competitor is using for those keywords.

The second feature included a new column that marked which website uses Adsense, making it that much easier to find new publishers for my Adwords campaigns.

Similarweb Verified Websites

The Similarweb Verification feature was born thanks to numerous requests from our users. You asked us to be able to showcase your real stats so that you’d have an easier time selling ad space on your site, and we delivered. This can help you attract potential investors or simply prove that you’re a leader in your industry. With this feature, you can connect any website you have on your Google Analytics account and be featured as ‘Verified’ on Similarweb. We’ve recently added an additional improvement to this feature, allowing you to choose between Views.

More Educational Tools

We’ve added several new tools to help you find your way around Similarweb’s many features, with detailed explanations and examples to help you get the most benefit from them.

We’ve launched a new knowledge base and included use cases for SEO, PPC, Media buying, Lead generation, Content marketing, and affiliate management.

We’ve also integrated articles and videos inside our platform.

To make things even easier we’ve opened a Similarweb YouTube channel that contains all of our short tutorials for Similarweb platform. You’re welcome to visit this channel and watch 1-1.5 minutes videos with pinpointed uses of our platform.

More and Better API Tools

Similarweb offers many API solutions and this year included many new and exciting updates for these solutions. We’ve launched a new API website and added more endpoints that allow developers to integrate Similarweb’s data into their own applications and the ability to build customized dashboards based on our data.

Closing the year with a promise for more!

I’ve really enjoyed sharing these features and product updates with you for the past year and I can already tell you that there’s a lot more planned for 2015. With more app analysis features, tools that turn insights into actiHug the developer dayon items and additional communication channels with our users, 2015 promises to be a great year!