Mind The Gap: A Complete Guide to Traffic Gap Analysis (+ Checklist)

Website traffic is the heartbeat of your online presence. It represents the vitality of your brand and how well you engage with your target audience.

While monitoring your own website’s traffic is always important, it’s only when you compare it against your competitors’ that the full picture of where you’re missing out emerges.

So, how do you find where those missed opportunities lie? By running a traffic gap analysis on your competitors

Strap in for our full guide on traffic gap analysis – a step-by-step on how to decode your competitors’ most lucrative traffic sources and successes – with a little help from Similarweb along the way.

What is traffic gap analysis?

Traffic gap analysis is the process of comparing your website’s traffic to that of your competitors. You examine the trend of their organic, paid, referral, social and direct traffic to find out:

• How much traffic they are getting
• Which of their channels drive the most traffic
• Their audience dynamics
• The demographics and locations of their most engaged audiences

Why is traffic gap analysis important?

Monitoring your own website traffic isn’t going to help you outpace your competitors. You’ve got to understand what’s working for them, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, to bridge any gaps in traffic and eventually outperform them. That’s where a traffic gap analysis comes in.

A traffic gap analysis will help you:

Benchmark your performance: With a clearer picture of where you stand in the industry, you’ll not only get a benchmark for success but set more realistic goals for growth.

Spot opportunities: Your competitors might be tapping into traffic sources you haven’t yet considered.

Better allocate resources: By uncovering your competitors’ high traffic sources, you can focus your resources on channels you know drive success.

Stay ahead of the curve: Digital trends and audience behavior shifts rapidly. With regular traffic gap analysis, you can stay updated with these changes and stay in the game.

How to run a traffic gap analysis

1) Analyze your competitors’ traffic performance

Identify their traffic trend

To build a foundation for your traffic gap analysis, you first need to analyze your competitors’ general traffic trend over time. And to get this data, you can use a traffic analytics platform like Similarweb

On our platform, you can view a competitor’s performance using the Website Analysis module, and from there zero in on their visits over time to analyze the traffic trend over a particular period:

Here’s a snapshot of Starbucks’ website traffic trend worldwide over the last 12 months as an example. With this view, you can change the date range, country and type of traffic (desktop, mobile or both) you’d like to analyze. 

Check their traffic share by country

Next, discover which countries are driving the most traffic to your competitors’ website by looking at the ‘Top Countries’ section. Get a full list of countries they receive traffic from sorted by share of traffic:

Investigate their traffic sources

Then check out how your competitor’s traffic is shared between different marketing channels to identify their key traffic sources:

Looking at Starbucks’ marketing channels overview, you’ll see that their biggest sources are organic traffic and direct traffic (no surprises here given that Starbucks is a household name) but they get the least traffic from social and email.

2) Compare your competitors’ traffic against yours

The next step is comparing your website’s traffic with that of your competitors. This step is at the core of traffic gap analysis, as it illuminates the gaps, strengths and weaknesses of the competitive set that will later form the roadmap you’ll use to win more traffic.

With Similarweb it couldn’t be easier to see direct comparisons of how your website traffic measures up to your competitors.

Using the same Website Analysis module, add in your brand alongside up to 4 competitors to compare the traffic and engagement of all sites:

With this overview, look for gaps between you and your competitors according to:

Traffic trend: Look into the traffic trends as a whole to see where you stand against competitors. Are you getting the most, the least or an average amount of traffic? Use this as a benchmark of what you could potentially achieve.

Then, look for spikes in traffic that your competitors are getting (but you are not) to understand seasonal trends that you could be capitalizing on.

Device: Comparing the device-specific traffic (mobile vs. desktop) of you and your competitors can reveal your target audience’s preferences, and signal if and where you need to optimize your website and content to better suit them.

Country traffic share: See if competitors are getting significant traffic from a country where you have little to none to seek out areas of improvement – or even new market opportunities!

Perform gap analysis for each traffic source

1) Organic traffic

Analyze gaps in organic traffic and engagement data

Dive into a competitor’s organic traffic and engagement metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their SEO strategy and the quality of their user experience and content. When compared with your website’s own data, you’ll quickly see where you could drive more traffic or improve engagement.

Is your bounce rate higher than the rest? Maybe your content isn’t quite resonating with your audience. Or, do you have lower pages per visit or visit duration? If so, you need to figure out what keeps your audience on their site for longer.

Look into the ‘Organic Traffic’ tab on your competitive Channel Traffic overview on Similarweb’s platform to dig out some juicy traffic insights:

Then, look under the Traffic and Engagement page to compare your engagement data. Similarweb will automatically highlight which website is winning for each metric:

Analyze keyword gaps and overlaps

Keywords are the pillars of organic traffic. Analyzing keyword gaps (keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t) and overlaps (keywords both you and competitors rank for) can shine a light on a host of untapped keyword and content opportunities that could result in more organic traffic to your site.

Find out why your competitors are ranking highly for some keywords when you’re not. They could be keywords you’re actively trying to target, or keywords you’re missing out on completely. Whichever it is, analyze the overlap between you and your competitors with Similarweb’s Keyword Gap tool:

Once here, you can see where you are losing out on keyword traffic share, or spot brand new keyword opportunities. Filter by traffic, search volume and search intent to qualify which of your competitors’ best performing keywords could drive more organic traffic to your website.

Look for content gaps

We all know content is King. And great content is the key to driving organic traffic. So naturally, analyzing gaps in your content compared with competitors is a pretty important step.

It’s about looking at the existing content, topics and keywords they’re focusing on to uncover their biggest traffic magnets.

First things first – take a good look at your competitors’ content. Everything from their articles and guides, to their service or product pages. Look for patterns – what topics are they covering? Are there gaps in their content that you could fill with your own unique perspective or expertise?

Next, assess the quality. Search engines prize high-quality content above everything else, so scrutinize depth, relevance, and engagement levels. Where can you one-up them with more comprehensive, engaging and up-to-date versions of your competitors’ content?

Identify opportunities using ranking distribution

Get an understanding of which keywords your competitors rank for on Google to spot any keyword opportunities that could boost your own organic rankings.

With Similarweb’s Ranking Distribution tool, you can access a full list of keywords your competitors rank for and use the available filters to refine by specific keyword, search volume or position (i.e. 1-3 or top 20) to extract their best keywords:

Analyze your competitor’s website structure and technical performance

Analyzing a website’s technical performance can reveal a lot about how traffic gaps are formed in the first place. So, examining your competitors’ site structure and technical performance is an important step in understanding why their site may be getting more traffic – and could be the key to closing the gap.

Here’s how to get a sense of their websites’ technical performance:

1. Crawl their site: Use your preferred crawler tool, such as the Similarweb Site Audit tool
2. Assess website performance: Review their sitemaps, schemas and page redirects and seek out technical errors with canonical tags, 404 pages, duplicated URLs and more. Users hate nothing more than slow loading times, so check their site’s speed (using Google’s free PageSpeed API)
3. Dive into site hierarchy and navigation: Look at how they organize and present their content to shed light on why certain pages attract more traffic – a crucial piece of the puzzle for your traffic gap analysis
4. Evaluate page performance: Delve into the performance of their high traffic pages. Is it page loading speed giving them an advantage?

2) Paid traffic gap analysis

Spot paid traffic gaps and trends

PPC is a potent source of traffic. And one that can be acquired more easily than the rest with the right strategies and investment. But, how do you know you’re doing enough to secure a solid stream of paid traffic?

By examining your competitors’ paid traffic trends

Look closely at the ebbs and flows, peaks in paid activity and areas of consistent growth. Then, compare it with yours to highlight any gaps you need to fill to win that paid traffic for yourself.

Compare paid traffic trends using Similarweb’s Paid Search overview feature, under the main Paid Search module. Here, you can compare traffic trends with up to 4 competitors by selecting the ‘Paid Search Traffic’ tab on the graph:

Notice a common surge in paid traffic over the holiday season and summer months across this competitive set. Trend patterns like this could indicate when the target audience is most likely to engage with paid ads.

Analyze gaps in ad spend

Looking at how much your competitors are investing in their paid strategy gives you insight into what and where they are spending to capture paid traffic. And, when you compare their ad spend to their actual paid traffic for that month, you’ll see whether their spend decisions resulted in more traffic.

This could highlight gaps in your PPC spend where you are either spending too much or not enough. With definitive proof of where it pays off to invest budget, you can allocate more wisely for greater returns in paid traffic.

See your competitors’ ad spend under the ‘PPC spend’ tab on the graph:

It looks like Starbucks invests most of their PPC budget between September and December. This lines up with the release of their eagerly awaited autumn and holiday menus each year, which have become quite the cultural phenomenon. After all, it’s not really autumn until your first taste of a pumpkin spice latte

Analyze gaps in paid keyword traffic share

Next up, pinpoint the paid keywords that are driving the most visitors to your competitors’ websites. Look at the traffic share for each of the top paid keywords to highlight gaps where you are not yet targeting high-traffic keywords in your paid strategy.

You can find a snapshot of the top paid keywords in your Paid Search overview. Access the full list to analyze the competitive keyword traffic share:

Look at the distribution of traffic for each keyword to see where you have little to no share. You can also select ‘newly discovered’ and ‘trending terms’ to find keywords that are currently gaining traction for your competitors that you are yet to target. 

Compare landing page and copy

Why is dissecting your competitors’ most successful landing pages and ad copy important to traffic gap analysis? Because they’re the key to unlocking what resonates strongly with your shared target audience, and what causes them to actually click and convert.

Looking into the messaging, value propositions, CTAs and design formats that actually drive traffic will highlight a ton of areas where you could improve. Often, even the smallest tweaks inspired by competitive insight can result in an uplift in paid traffic.

To examine competitive ads using Similarweb, check out our Search Ads feature. Here, you can view the ads that are driving the most traffic and engagement for your competitors:

You’ll see the traffic and estimated ad impressions of your competitors’ highest-performing ads, as well as the search ad text exactly as it appears on search results. Happy spying!

Similarweb can also help you unearth your competitors’ high-traffic landing pages

Using our Paid Landing Pages tool, you will get a list of their top landing pages ready for you to slice and dice:

Examine the top-performing landing pages for each competitor and dive deeper with details of the ads and keywords driving traffic to them. 

3) Referral traffic gap analysis

Compare your referral traffic trend

Look at how much referral traffic your competitors receive to get an idea of where you stand and if there’s opportunity for you to win more traffic from external sources.

Is their referral traffic consistently growing while yours remains a little stagnant? Find out by switching to the ‘Referrals’ tab on your Marketing Channels overview to compare their referral traffic trend to yours:

Find gaps in referring domains

If you find their referral traffic is looking pretty healthy, investigate where it’s coming from by identifying their biggest traffic sources – the domains and websites that are consistently sending visitors their way.

You may be able to target similar websites and redirect some of that traffic to your own website.

Delve into your competitors’ referring domains with Similarweb’s Incoming Traffic tool:

For each referring domain, you can see how the traffic share is split between your chosen set of competitors. And, as an added perk, our platform will identify which brand is getting the most engagement from visitors sent from each domain

Analyze referral traffic gap by industry

On your Incoming Traffic overview, you can see the industry that each referring domain belongs to.

Analyzing referral traffic gaps by specific industry is a strategic approach for maximum relevance and quality. Rather than casting a wide net, honing in on industry-specific sources minimizes noise from aggregators and news sites, offering a clearer picture of the websites that could genuinely drive traffic to your website.

This focused analysis helps identify key players in your niche, fostering more targeted and effective referral traffic strategies.

4) Social traffic gap analysis

Find gaps in social traffic

As we all know, social media can be an absolute powerhouse when it comes to driving traffic. But, how does your social traffic measure up to your closest rivals?

Refer back to your Marketing Channel Overview under the Social tab to compare social traffic trends:

When analyzing your competitors’ social traffic trend, look for periods when it spikes or dips. Check it against your own to see if there’s a pattern, and if not, you could be missing out on times in the year when your competitors go full throttle with their social strategies, and you don’t.

Analyze in traffic gap by social network

Next, discover the social platforms they are getting the most traffic from. This will show you where you’re falling behind and if there are untapped opportunities to win more traffic from platforms you aren’t prioritizing as much.

Find this out using Similarweb’s Social Overview feature, where you can add in your competitors to see the share of traffic split by network:

In this competitive set, YouTube, Facebook and Reddit appear to be the most popular social networks for the target audience. But, notice that Dunkin’ Donuts is getting a fair amount of traffic from Pinterest, and the others next to none. Are they onto something here? This could be a potential opportunity to capture another sub section of the target audience. 

Drill down into their pages and posts

How are your competitors killing it on social media? Find out by scrutinizing every inch of their social media pages and posts to pinpoint exactly what’s driving their success.

Here’s a quick step-by-step:

1) Assess their social network profiles

• How many followers/subscribers do they have?
• How much engagement are they getting? (likes, comments, shares)
• How frequently do they share posts and stories?

2) Examine the content they share

• What are they posting? (articles, guides, images, videos, infographics)
• Their messaging, style and tone-of-voice
• The topics and themes they focus on

3) See how they interact with their audience

• Check how they engage with and respond to comments and messages from their followers/subscribers
• What are their engagement strategies? (polls, competitions)

4) Analyze their metrics

Use social media analytics tools or platforms’ built-in insights to see data on your competitors’ posts, including engagement rates, reach, and click-throughs. Compare these metrics with your own to identify gaps you need to fill.

5) Look for opportunities

Spot areas where your competitors may be missing out on opportunities, such as underutilized platforms or topics that are not being addressed. Then, focus on these in your own social strategy to gain a competitive edge.

5) Direct traffic gap analysis

When a website gets a lot of direct traffic, it’s a bit of a flex

It’s a clear sign of great brand recognition and a loyal customer base that just keeps coming back.

Understanding how your direct traffic measures up against competitors will highlight if your brand awareness and customer engagement strategies need a little more attention.

Compare direct traffic trends with competitors back in your Marketing Channel overview:

Compare branded search gaps

Ideally, every brand should be ranking in the top spot for keywords related to their brand name or key products. For instance, Starbucks would expect to rank at #1 for branded keywords like ‘starbucks’, ‘starbucks near me’, or ‘frappuccino’.

In the same way, your brand should be getting the lion’s share of traffic for your branded terms, but this is not always the case. Often competitors bid on them in PPC campaigns in an attempt to redirect traffic from your website to theirs.

Start by looking at how well your competitors are ranking for their own branded keywords using Similarweb’s Keyword tool. Are they dominating the traffic share of their branded keywords?

Then, look at your own business to see how you measure up. If your presence isn’t as strong in your own realm of branded keywords, you know you’ve got work to do to bridge the gap.

Next, find out if the reason you’re not ranking highly is because competitors are targeting your branded keywords in their content or paid search campaigns. You can do this using an ad intelligence tool, like Similarweb’s Search Ads tool.

Upload a branded keyword list to see every search ad that targets your branded keywords:

Here, you can see that in September, several rival coffee brands like Keurig, Folgers and Nespresso targeted Starbucks’ branded keyword ‘pumpkin spice latte’ – no doubt in an attempt to capitalize on the seasonal craze.

Build a strategy to eliminate traffic gaps

Now that you’ve gathered all of this juicy traffic gap data, you need an action plan to close those gaps and start boosting traffic

1) Prioritize what to target

You can’t compete with every competitor, and there’s not enough time to fill every gap. So, begin by carefully selecting the competitors and niches that most align with your business and target audience to allow for a more effective and targeted approach.

2) Focus on low-hanging opportunities

Focus first on the traffic sources that will help you close as much of a gap in the least amount of time. This could mean going after high-impact referral domains, doubling down on a particular social platform, or targeting high-traffic keywords in your content.

3) Tackle each traffic source individually

Then, create a more detailed action plan for each traffic source that outlines your strategies, tactics, and objectives. Whether it’s refining your content strategy, stepping up your SEO efforts, or forging new partnerships or collaborations, define clear milestones, allocate necessary resources, and set achievable timelines.

4) Continuously monitor and measure

The journey to eliminating traffic gaps never really ends. You need to regularly monitor your progress and measure the impact of any new tactics you implement.

Use analytics tools (like Similarweb) to track the organic keywords discovered during your analysis, and set up alerts to protect your important paid keywords (both branded and non-branded). You can also set up a tracker to monitor the key metrics we’ve reviewed here across the various traffic sources using our Competitive Tracker.

By following this strategic framework, you will close traffic gaps quickly and efficiently to get more eyes on your website and forge better connections with your audience.

To sum up…

In this comprehensive guide to traffic gap analysis, we’ve walked through how to examine your competitors’ most successful traffic sources to identify gaps and opportunities that could have pretty huge impact on your own future traffic trend

And, who better to help you on this quest for traffic than Similarweb? With its fresh, accurate and comprehensive data, you’ll leave no stone unturned when it comes to digging into your competitors’ best traffic sources and strategies.

Get your checklist:

FAQs

What is traffic gap analysis?

Traffic gap analysis is the process of comparing your website’s traffic with that of your competitors to get valuable insights into their strategies, help you identify opportunities, allocate resources effectively, and stay competitive in the digital landscape.

How can I perform traffic gap analysis?

Start by analyzing your competitors’ traffic performance and compare it against yours. Dive into various traffic sources, such as organic, paid, referral, social, and direct traffic, to uncover gaps and strengths.

What makes Similarweb the best tool for traffic gap analysis?

Similarweb is a powerful tool that simplifies the traffic gap analysis process. It provides accurate and reliable competitive data, allowing you to compare your website’s performance with that of your competitors. Similarweb helps you uncover hidden insights, spot opportunities, and make data-driven decisions.

How frequently should I conduct a traffic gap analysis?

The frequency of traffic gap analysis depends on your industry and the pace of change in your niche. However, it’s generally advisable to perform it regularly, at least on a quarterly or bi-annual basis, to stay updated with evolving trends and competitive strategies.