13 ways to check traffic to someone else’s site

Site traffic — the number of people who visited the site during a certain period of time. This data allows you to give a basic assessment of the effectiveness of both the entire resource and its individual sections. First of all, it is important to know the traffic statistics of your own site, but it is also useful to check information on someone else’s site — for example, a competitive one.

When might you need site traffic statistics?:

• This is your competitor. Knowing the activity of the rival resource will help you navigate the overall market situation, determine the potential volume of traffic, highlight its seasonal fluctuations, and see how experiments of a competing business (product, marketing, and technical) affect traffic. In the end, data on traffic to a popular site in the right niche will help you determine the level to strive for.
• You want to learn more about organic traffic. The data will help you find out which pages users clicked through to from search, which keywords, and analyze various behavioral factors: how long users checked on the page, how deep the page was viewed, and so on.
• You are going to buy ads on this site. As an advertiser, it’s important for you to know how much audience reach your content can get. A link placed on a resource with high traffic is very likely to guarantee traffic to your site. Resources that publish ads take this into account and most often leave the session counter data open. In some cases, they may publish a traffic summary on a page specifically designed to attract advertisers.
• You are thinking about purchasing or contracting links. First, site traffic may indirectly indicate a high level of trust in it. Secondly, if your goal is not only to strengthen your link profile, but also to attract a new audience, then data on the popularity of the target site is a must-have.
• You are going to open a business or launch a new project. Before entering the market, you need to understand the needs of users, evaluate the popularity of a niche, and predict the potential number of customers. This is what site traffic analysis will help you do.
• You want to buy a website. Traffic statistics will show you whether the site is filtered and whether there are problems with indexing. In addition, information about traffic will give you an understanding of how stable the growth of visitors is and, accordingly, whether it makes sense to buy this site.