Folder Analysis: Don’t stop your analysis at a site level, dig deeper!

The Telegraph is one of the largest and most diverse newspapers in the UK, covering a wide range of topics from Automotive to News to Sports. You can use Similarweb Platform to analyze Telegraph’s traffic and acquisition channels and understand how they drive over 135M visits to their site each month. But what if you are interested in only one segment of this diverse site? Folder Analysis enables you to replicate the power of Similarweb Website Analysis at a directory level within a domain.

• Compare the market size of subsections of sites like telegraph.co.uk/sport and telegraph.co.uk/cars. Then compare to competitor subsections like bbc.co.uk/autos and to pure-play competitors like autotrader.co.uk. In the below example, we map out the market size for Telegraph’s Sports and Cars section. Do you know your category market share?

• When analyzing telegraph.co.uk/sports’s traffic and bounce rate data, we can see that the bounce rate is directly correlated with the traffic volume. As the traffic to the folder increased, the folder quality decreased, and as the traffic to the folder decreased, the folder quality increased once again. How engaged are users across your competitor’s site?

• By analyzing the channel proportion to specific folders we are able to identify that the Organic Search traffic share mimics the exact same trend as the traffic and engagement graphs as seen above. Organic Search may be driving higher traffic and higher bounce rates.  How do users arrive to your competitor’s subsections in sites and how can you optimize your channels?

• Once we dig deeper into the specific keywords that drive traffic to the folder, three interesting keywords follow the same trend from above. These keywords may be in part responsible for the rise and fall of the bounce rate, as users that searched for terms like “bbc” were actually searching for Telegraph’s close competitor, while “michael phelps diet” are less related to sports and more towards health and nutrition. Using Folder Analysis, you can also analyze the referral traffic to specific folders. Do you optimize your Referral and SEO/PPC strategy according to your competitor’s traffic to specific folders?

• Using Folder Analysis, you can understand the audience behavior by analyzing whether users navigate directly to folders from outside of the site or navigate from within the site. For example, when a user searches for “telegraph” in Google, they can navigate to Telegraph’s home page and from there potentially discovering the “Sport” folder, or they can simply navigate directly to the Sport folder. Is your site properly indexed on search engines? Do you direct users to the relevant sections of your site? What content is driving high volume of traffic to your competition?

Using Folder Analysis to analyze telegraph.co.uk/sport’s Organic traffic in September, we can see that users navigate mostly to the “Sport” folder from within other sections of the Telegraph site, while specific sport-related searches like “simone biles” drive users directly from the search results to the folder. What is the real intent and behavior of users in your industry? Do they know what they are looking for or are they just browsing? How can you optimize your site to match navigational behavior?