How to Get Traffic Analytics for a Website You Don't Own

This guide explores strategies for getting web traffic data for third-party websites, i.e., websites that are not owned and operated by you. The guide is helpful for providing benchmarks for your own website, in particular benchmarks for overall traffic levels, traffic variation with time, and your audience profile. It can also be used to address the website-based method of gauging the popularity of a topic online.

The tools discussed here are classified based on cost to users viewing the analytics (free versus freemium versus paid; the freemium tools have a publicly accessible free version but more data available in a paid version), method of estimation (direct measurement (using server logs or a tracking beacon) versus estimation by extrapolating from a panel of users who are being tracked) and website coverage (some websites only, versus most or all websites).

If you want analytics for your own websites, then you should install analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Quantcast Measure, Chartbeat, or others directly on your site, rather than use the methods below. The methods below can give you some insight into how others might be trying to estimate your traffic data.

Method 1
Method 1 of 7:

Using Quantcast Measure

  1. Image titled Quantcast Trello weekly cycle.png
    1
    Get data about the website, if available, at https://www.quantcast.com/<domainname>.
  2. 2
    Use the following rules of thumb when judging whether the website you are looking for (or similar websites) would have Quantcast data available.
    • Most of the websites that share data with Quantcast and allow Quantcast to show the data publicly tend to be media websites whose business model is advertising-based. Moreover, most of them are either based in on have a significant presence in the United States, since Quantcast data is most reliable and most useful to show to advertisers for United States audiences. In particular, if the topic of your website is not one that media companies and publishing groups have interest in, it can be hard to find examples to benchmark against.
    • Another thing to keep in mind regarding the availability of Quantcast data is that the decision to share data with Quantcast is made at the level of the media company or publishing group, rather than the individual website. Therefore, either all (or most) of the websites under a given publishing group would have QM data publicly visible, or none would. Some publishing groups and companies that have publicly available QM data for most of their sites include: the Stack Exchange Network (Stack Overflow and all Stack Exchange sites), Tegna, Woven Digital (Uproxx, Brobible, and some other male-focused humor and celebrity news sites), Vox Media Network (Vox, Eater, Racked, and a few other sites), Onion Media Network (The Onion and sister sites), COED Media Group Network (COED, College Candy, and Busted Coverage), Bonnier Corporation Network (many outdoors sporting sites as well as popsci.com), and Idle Media (HipHopEarly and sister sites). Some publishers that do not use Quantcast Measure or do not share the data publicly include Hearst, Conde Nast, and Time Inc.
    • Image-sharing sites (such as Imgur, Giphy, Gfycat) all have publicly available Quantcast Measure data.
    • However, it doesn't hurt to check even if you don't expect the website to share data using Quantcast Measure. For instance, Trello[1] and Glassdoor[2] both use Quantcast Measure though they don't fit the "publisher" stereotype perfectly.
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  3. 3
    Examine the various parts of the traffic report.
  4. 4
    Record any data you want to reference in the future.
    • Websites may take themselves off of Quantcast Measure, or may stop making their data publicly visible. So you should save or screenshot the page, or record any data you need to, while you can access the data.
    • You can request archival of the existing report using archive.is. Note that the archived page will not have the full functionality of the original page because of limitations in the way archival interacts with JavaScript.
  5. 5
    Consider contacting the website owner to request making the data publicly available.
    • If the website owner is not using Quantcast Measure, consider contacting the website owner proposing it.
    • If the website owner is using Quantcast Measure, and has not made the data available, consider contacting the website owner regarding making the data publicly available. However, since Quantcast Measure makes data publicly visible by default, website owners who choose to hide the data are usually convinced of the superiority of doing so, and you may not be persuasive.
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Method 2
Method 2 of 7:

Using SimilarWeb

  1. Image titled SimilarWeb Zillow.png
    1
    Get data about the website, if available, at https://www.similarweb.com/website/<domainname>
  2. 2
    Examine the various parts of the traffic report.
  3. 3
    Record any data you want to reference in the future.
    • SimilarWeb only shows a six-month history for visits and one month of estimated data for other metrics. Therefore, you should record, by saving or screenshotting, any data you want to reference in the future.
    • You can request archival of the existing profile using archive.is. Note that the archived page will not have the full functionality of the original page because of limitations in the way archival interacts with JavaScript.
  4. 4
    Keep in mind the following regarding error ranges, in cases where the data is estimated and not measured with Google Analytics.
    • The estimated values for visits reported by SimilarWeb vary between half of and four times the values directly measured by sources such as Quantcast Measure or Google Analytics. The discrepancy for pageviews can be larger, usually arising from significant differences in pages per visit estimates.
      • In July 2017, SimilarWeb estimated about 499,000 visits and 2.06 pages per visit to LessWrong, whereas Google Analytics data for the site (also available via SimilarWeb) showed 146,000 visits and 1.88 pages per visit.[9]
      • In July 2017, SimilarWeb estimated 4.62 million visits and 9.18 pages per visit to its own site, whereas Google Analytics data for the site (also available via SimilarWeb) showed 2.82 million visits and 2.78 pages per visit. The overestimation of visits is about 50%, whereas the pageview estimate is over five times the Google Analytics value.[10]
      • Glassdoor reported about 40 million visits and 140 million pageviews on Quantcast Measure in March 2017,[2] compared with 54.5 million visits and about 200 million pageviews on SimilarWeb in the same time period.[11]
      • Trello reported about 46 million visits and 75 million pageviews on Quantcast Measure in March 2017,[1] compared with about 85 million visits and 600 million pageviews on SimilarWeb.[12]
      • Stack Overflow reported about 265 million visits and 660 million pageviews on Quantcast Measure in March 2017,[13] compared with 337 million visits and 1 billion pageviews on SimilarWeb.[14]
      • Upworthy reported 9.6 million visits and 11.3 million pageviews on Quantcast Measure in March 2017,[15] compared with 7.5 million visits and 9.5 million pageviews on SimilarWeb.[16]
    • Accuracy in estimation of visits and pageviews is higher for websites with more traffic, and more unique visitors.
    • Ranks and category ranks should be treated as loose estimates.
    • Although the monthly traffic levels are not very accurate, the trends between months are somewhat more accurate. In other words, you can use the six-month graph of visits to get some sense of how traffic is varying with time. However, before drawing any conclusions, see if the trend is consistent with what you would expect given the annual traffic cycle for that type of website. Unfortunately, a six-month history does not provide a clear view into the full annual cycle. If you have SimilarWeb PRO, you will be able to get a better sense of whether an annual cycle is being captured and how that compares with expectations.
  5. 5
    Consider contacting the website owner to connect the SimilarWeb data with Google Analytics. This will help the website owner be able to share up-to-date traffic data at any time, without having to manually export data from Google Analytics.
  6. 6
    If you use SimilarWeb frequently, consider installing the SimilarWeb browser extension (or add-on).[17]
    • The browser extension is available for Google Chrome,[18] Mozilla Firefox (where it's called an "add-on"),[19] and Safari.[20]
    • With this extension, you will be able to, whenever you visit a website, view the SimilarWeb metrics from within your browser itself, without having to separately visit the SimilarWeb profile of the website. The extension does not give you access to any other information beyond what you can get from the profile -- it just makes the lookup process quicker.
    • In return, installing the extension means that you get included in the panel of users whose behavior is collected by SimilarWeb to estimate website traffic.
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Method 3
Method 3 of 7:

Using Alexa Internet

  1. Image titled Alexa Charity Navigator annual cycle.png
    Image titled Alexa Zillow.png
    1
    Get data about the website, if available, at https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/<domainname>.
    • This service is a freemium one, and offers mostly estimated results, but for almost all websites.
    • For instance, for the website zillow.com of Zillow, you can get data at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/zillow.com.[21] Similarly, for the website trello.com of Trello, you can get data at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/trello.com.[22]
    • Traffic for subdomains is included in traffic for the main domain, and if you enter a subdomain in the URL structure above, it redirects to the page for the main domain. For instance, http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ocw.mit.edu redirects to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mit.edu.
    • For most websites, Alexa uses estimated data, rather than direct first-party measured data. You will see a box on the top right saying "This site's metrics are estimated" and, below that, "Is this your site? Certify your site's metrics." Some sites have certified their site metrics with Alexa, which means that Alexa uses direct first-party measurement for the site's traffic. However, this only means that Alexa measures the site's traffic correctly; the site's rank is still estimated since that relies on comparison with many other sites, most of which are estimated and not directly measured.
    • Paying users can access more data, including subdomain traffic.
    • If you want historical data, check for archives of the Alexa page on archive.is. If the website has a Wikipedia page with an infobox that includes the Alexa rank, you can check the history of the Wikipedia page to get historical Alexa rank data; however this is a tedious process.
  2. 2
    Examine the various parts of the page.
    • The top of the page includes a "Global rank" and Rank in the country where the rank is highest. For websites in the top 100,000, historical data on global rank over the past year is also displayed. For others, there is space for the graph but it is not populated.
    • Other sections that show some information are: Audience Geography, engagement data, search traffic and keywords, upstream sites, linking sites, related sites, subdomains, load speed, site description, and audience demographics. The free version only shows the top five results for some of these categories; paying users can access longer lists.
    • Monthly Unique Visitor Metrics and sites people go to next are available to paying users.
    • Notably, there is no direct data on the number of visitors and pageviews available to non-paying users, even though the ranking is based on those metrics.
  3. 3
    Record any data you want to reference in the future.
    • Alexa Internet shows a one-year history of the site rank, and moreover, does not show even this data for sites not in the top 100,000.
    • You can request archival of the existing profile using archive.is. Note that the archived page will not have the full functionality of the original page because of limitations in the way archival interacts with JavaScript.
  4. 4
    Keep in mind the following regarding error ranges.
    • As mentioned above, Alexa generally uses data estimated from users of the Alexa toolbar, rather than first-party (i.e. individual websites') traffic numbers. This means that there is selection bias in the Alexa data: users of the Alexa toolbar do not represent a random sample of internet users. Peter Norvig gives some anecdotal evidence of this problem in his article "Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design".[23]
    • Alexa's traffic estimates can be off from first-party measurements by a factor of three in either direction.
    • Since Alexa does not publicly release its traffic estimates, but only releases a rank, the rank should be treated as only a loose estimate.
    • Be particularly suspicious of Alexa giving a very good rank in a smaller country that has no direct connection with the subject matter at hand. This is usually due to Alexa's sample accidentally oversampling users in the country using the website.[24]
    • Given the inaccuracy of the rank estimates, the trend in rank as seen in the chart is also not necessarily accurate, although large fluctuations in rank usually contain some kernel of truth. As a general rule, you should believe such a trend only if it is consistent with other sources of evidence, or common sense about the annual traffic cycle. Some examples of correctly picked trends are annual cycles for charity evaluators such as GiveWell[25] and the Effective Altruism Forum.[26] The increase in traffic and improvement in rank is consistent with first-party data published for the sites,[27] [28] as well as with the general intuition that charity-related activity peaks around December/January (Giving Season).
  5. 5
    If you use Alexa frequently, consider installing the Alexa browser extension (or add-on).
    • The browser extension, also known as the Toolbar, is available for Chrome[29] [30]
    • With this extension, you will be able to, whenever you visit a website, view the SimilarWeb metrics from within your browser itself, without having to separately visit the Alexa Internet profile of the website. The extension does not give you access to any other information beyond what you can get from the profile -- it just makes the lookup process quicker.
    • In return, installing the extension means that you get included in the panel of users whose behavior is collected by Alexa Internet to estimate website traffic.
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Method 4
Method 4 of 7:

Using HypeStat

  1. 1
    Get data about the website, if available, at <domainname>.hypestat.com
  2. 2
    Examine the various parts of the page.
    • Most of the page is obtained by cobbling together data available from different sources, including Alexa, Quantcast, SEO Majestic, SemRush, Moz, Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Safe Browsing, MyWot.com reputation ratings, and WhoIs lookups.
    • The data includes an estimate for total traffic (daily and monthly unique visitors and pageviews). No source is provided for this data.
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Method 5
Method 5 of 7:

Using Website Traffic Statistics Pages and Similar Options

  1. 1
    For user-generated content/self-published content websites, look for statistics pages that include traffic and social data for items.
  2. 2
    Look for monthly, quarterly, and annual review posts.
    • For public companies, look for information in quarterly filings. For instance, Facebook's quarterly report includes a number of details about its userbase size, including Monthly Active Users (MAUs), Daily Active Users (DAUs), mobile MAUs, and mobile DAUs.[38]
    • Websites sometimes publish year-in-review, quarter-in-review, or other similar blog posts periodically with traffic metrics. Examples include charity evaluator GiveWell,[27] pornographic video site Pornhub,[39] and sharing/discussion site Reddit. In addition to looking for such reports on the website itself, look for them on the website of the publishing company that owns the website, if it is different (this distinction is particularly important for websites owned by a publishing conglomerate that owns many such websites).
  3. 3
    Look for information on pages created by the website for potential advertisers.[40]
    • The page typically has a URL of the form <domainname>/advertise or <domainname>/advertising
    • Some examples of websites that provide some traffic data are Reddit,[41] BuzzFeed,[42] Mashable[43] Dezeen,[44] and Slate Star Codex.
    • One downside is that the data is not automatically updated, and therefore provides only an estimate based on the time the page was updated. You may be able to use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to get an estimate of when the page was last updated and how current the data is.
  4. 4
    Contact the website directly asking for data.
    • Some websites offer an email address for potential advertisers to get in touch with them. If you are an advertiser or can represent yourself as asking on behalf of an advertiser, you may be able to use email to get the website owners to share traffic data, or address questions about the nature of their audience.
    • Otherwise, try contacting the website owner or administrator asking for data, such as a Google Analytics data dump. There are two kinds of concerns you may ned to overcome: (a) unwillingness to share, and (b) effort of exporting data. You can reduce (b) by providing clear steps for how to export data, or even suggesting that they add your email account with "View & Analyze" permissions to their Google Analytics or equivalent solution. How you can overcome (a) is something you will need to figure out on a case-by-case basis.
  5. 5
    Use ad networks or ad planners that the website has hooked to.
    • Google Display Planner can be used to get traffic estimates for some websites.
    • We can use other ad networks sometimes.
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Method 6
Method 6 of 7:

Using Other Web Sources

  1. 1
    Check the Wikipedia page about the website or associated organizations.
    • The Wikipedia page may have an infobox that contains entries with information about the traffic. This could include the Alexa rank.
    • The text of the Wikipedia page may have information about traffic. The information may be in the introduction, a section on traffic, or a history or growth section. Check the sources cited to determine the reliability and methodology.
  2. 2
    Use web search (such as Google Search) and within-site search.
    • You can search within the website by using the site: operator in Google Search, or use the site's own internal search engine.
    • You can search in publications that cover news in the domain of the website (using web search with the site: operator, or within-site search). For instance, for publisher websites, search in sources such as digiday.com, adexchanger.com, adweek.com, and adage.com. For technology companies, search in sources such as techcrunch.com and mashable.com.
    • You can search the whole Internet with a search term such as "<domainname> pageviews" or "<domainname> traffic statistics" (try both with and without quotes). Keep in mind that the top results are likely to be services such as Quantcast, SimilarWeb, or Alexa, plus other similar services and fake or paywalled services. You should probably check up to three pages of results.
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Method 7
Method 7 of 7:

Using Surveys

  1. 1
    Look for existing surveys that give an estimate of use.
    • Survey data can generally help give an estimate of the number of users, and the average frequency of visits. They are too crude a tool to estimate the number of pageviews.
    • Surveys have both upsides and downsides. They rely on memory, and therefore tend to give more weight to visits to websites that the user remembers. This can be a positive, if we are trying to measure the extent of genuine, intentional and/or impactful visits, but it can also lead to underestimation of sites that have a less distinctive brand (for instance, websites that people visit from search results to quickly answer a question, but do not register mentally as a source).
    • You can get surveys related to Internet use at the Pew Internet website of the Pew Research Center.[45] Another potential source is Public Knowledge (at publicknowledge.org). Another information source is the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Reach survey,[46] with results so far for India,[47] Nigeria,[48] and Brazil.[49]
  2. 2
    Consider conducting your own survey. This is helpful if there are no existing surveys asking for information on usage of the site.
    • You can design an online survey using tools such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Qualtrics.
    • You can use tools like SurveyMonkey Audience, Google Surveys, or Survata to distribute your survey to a general Internet audience in the United States and a few other countries (Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom). This approach works best for sites that cater to a general audience and have huge enough overall traffic. As a heuristic, for a website that gets over 10 million visits a month from the United States, you should be able to get a positive number of responses to the question "Have you visited this website?" if distributing to 100 people.
    • Alternatively, you can distribute the survey to a more targeted audience by sharing it in a Facebook group or a subreddit that reaches that audience. This is most useful for websites that cater to that audience, so that you can extrapolate from the surveyed sample to the total population to get a decent estimate of website traffic.
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References

  1. ↑ 1.01.11.2Quantcast data for Trello. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  2. ↑ 2.02.12.2Quantcast data for Glassdoor. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  3. ↑ Quantcast data for Math Stack Exchange. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  4. ↑ Archived Quantcast report for Twitch.tv, archived March 18, 2015, archived version retrieved April 26, 2017
  5. ↑ Archived Quantcast report for CNN.com, archived July 17, 2016, archived version retrieved April 26, 2017
  6. ↑ SimilarWeb profile for Zillow (zillow.com). Retrieved April 26, 2017
  7. ↑ SimilarWeb profile for ocw.mit.edu. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  8. ↑ Comparing Between SimilarWeb.com and SimilarWeb PRO, SimilarWeb via YouTube, August 4, 2014. Retrieved April 27, 2017. Note that some of the time range information is outdated (it says 3 months for free and 12 to 24 months for PRO, versus 6 month for free and 3 years for PRO now), but the video otherwise provides a good sense of the qualitative differences
  9. ↑ SimilarWeb profile for LessWrong (lesswrong.com). Retrieved August 7, 2017
  1. ↑ SimilarWeb profile for SimilarWeb. Retrieved August 7, 2017
  2. ↑ SimilarWeb profile for Glassdoor (glassdoor.com). Retrieved April 26, 2017
  3. ↑ SimilarWeb profile for Trello (trello.com). Retrieved April 26, 2017
  4. ↑ Quantcast report for Stack Overflow. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  5. ↑ SimilarWeb profile for Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com). Retrieved April 26, 2017
  6. ↑ Quantcast report on Upworthy. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  7. ↑ SimilarWeb profile for Upworthy. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  8. ↑ Introducing the All-New SimilarWeb Add-On, Tom Cohen, SimilarWeb News, December 2, 2014. Retrieved June 10, 2017
  9. ↑ SimilarWeb - Site Traffic Sources and Ranking, Chrome Store
  10. ↑ SimilarWeb - Website Traffic Sources and Ranking, Firefox Add-Ons
  11. ↑ Introducing: SimilarWeb Safari Extension, Tom Cohen, SimilarWeb, April 7, 2015. Retrieved June 10, 2017
  12. ↑ zillow.com traffic statistics from Alexa. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  13. ↑ trello.com traffic statistics from Alexa. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  14. ↑ Norvig, Peter. "Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design". norvig.com. 2007. Retrieved September 8, 2018.
  15. ↑ Does anybody here have any idea why GiveWell ranks so highly in South Korea according to Alexa Internet?, Vipul Naik, November 6, 2015. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  16. ↑ givewell.org traffic statistics from Alexa. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  17. ↑ effective-altruism.com traffic statistics from Alexa. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  18. ↑ 27.027.1GiveWell’s money moved and web traffic in 2015, Tyler Heishman, May 13, 2016. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  19. ↑ Effective Altruism Forum web traffic from Google Analytics, Vipul Naik, December 31, 2016. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  20. ↑ The Alexa Extension for Chrome. Retrieved June 10, 2017
  21. ↑ Alexa Traffic Rank, Chrome Store. Retrieved June 10, 2017
  22. ↑ HypeStat profile for imgur.com. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  23. ↑ HypeStat profile for starwars.wikia.com. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  24. ↑ reddit change: Moderators can now set their subreddit's traffic statistics page public, July 16, 2013. Retrieved June 1, 2017
  25. ↑ [reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/about/traffic Reddit traffic statistics for /r/unixporn]. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  26. ↑ [reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/about/traffic Reddit traffic statistics for r/EffectiveAltruism]. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  27. ↑ Upcoming Changes: View counts, users here now and traffic pages, Reddit, May 12, 2017. Retrieved June 3, 2017.
  28. ↑ StackExchange sites list, sorted by traffic. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  29. ↑ Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2016 Results, Facebook Investor Relations. Retrieved April 28, 2017
  30. ↑ Pornhub’s 2015 Year in Review (archived link)
  31. ↑ Check Website Traffic: 9 FREE Ways To Estimate Traffic Of Any Website (8. The business pages of websites: A good way to track website traffic for free), Anil Agarwal, Bloggers Passion
  32. ↑ Advertise on Reddit. Retrieved April 27, 2017
  33. ↑ BuzzFeed Advertise. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  34. ↑ Advertise with Mashable. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  35. ↑ Dezeen advertising information. Retrieved April 26, 2017
  36. ↑ Pew Research Center, Internet, Science & Tech. Retrieved April 28, 2017
  37. ↑ Global Reach, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, accessed December 22, 2016
  38. ↑ Global Reach/India survey, Wikimedia meta-wiki
  39. ↑ Global Reach/Nigeria survey
  40. ↑ Global Reach/Brazil survey

About This Article

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 19 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has been viewed 94,436 times.
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Co-authors: 19
Updated: December 29, 2022
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Categories: Website Traffic
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