How Accurate Is SimiliarWeb, Really?

malayan

malayan

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So, I've been following a legal site that's PURELY American in nature and SimilarWeb CLAIMS it's getting 1671594256636.png

But, I've been following this site quite closely for a few months and noticed something...

I've been accessing the site from Malaysian IPs for a few months and now:
1671594347387.png

Malaysia is nearly 5% of its traffic and I have a terribly hard time believing Malaysians are suddenly looking up this site more than every other country that's not the USA.

I'm guessing SimilarWeb extrapolates the number of people using SimilarWeb's plugin and makes a traffic guesstimate (the way Alexa) used to...

This leads me to the question: Unless the site owner has added the SimilarWeb JS, how accurate is it?

A little food for thought.
 
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The conclusion is that SimilarWeb seems to overestimate by just 1% when analyzing organic website traffic and overestimates visitors by around 17% - thedigitalmerchant
Click to expand...

Other sources I am seeing is saying its only about 75% accurate. I have never personally used simweb but according to searches on google their analytics is no where near close to what google analytics gives.
 
Neotoxin said:
Other sources I am seeing is saying its only about 75% accurate. I have never personally used simweb but according to searches on google their analytics is no where near close to what google analytics gives.
Click to expand...
It looks like it might be far worse than 25% inaccurate unless a random legal site in the US is getting 12,100 visits a month from a tiny country with an entirely different type of legal system.
 
Agree similarweb is not quite accurate. Could be 25% to 30% of the estimated traffic and sources. When there was Alexa, I had chance to compare some of my competitor sites on both of these platforms. Alexa had more accuracy than Similarweb. But both depend upon browser addon/plugin so it could just be an estimate. Now-a-days how many of us download toolbars or such plugins? Similarweb has also a feature to link your GA to it. It might be possible to pull data from GA and show more accurate visitors.
 
malayan said:
It looks like it might be far worse than 25% inaccurate unless a random legal site in the US is getting 12,100 visits a month from a tiny country with an entirely different type of legal system.
Click to expand...


I didn't look to far into it but thats interesting. Kind of sounds like simweb is just trying to get sales or whatever the case is by saying the rank is higher. My first intuition was a marketing boast for sales so idk....
 
You can check your own website in similarweb, compare the results with analytics and decide how accurate it is.
 
Its not the most accurate tool out there, but I think it's quite useful to get a "general idea" of a website's traffic and keywords, as long as you don't get too invested in the numbers.
I use it fairly often for adult kw research.
 
You should use Ahref estimated organic traffic analyses yo may get ~75% accuracy from there, that's it.
 
For larger sites, it is within the margin of error

For smaller sites, not so much
 
It is impossible to get accurate data.

btw most of these types of tools are using ISP data. so they do not need to track anything.
But for more accuracy, they use others data too. But ISP data is the main source for these types of tools.
 
SimilarWeb has a rather accurate estimation of traffic distribution from different sources
 
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