How Accurate Are Website Traffic Estimators ?

When you work at an agency or maybe in an organization for a couple of months or for a considerate time, and those organizations involve you in forecasting, proposals and client pitches, you will be asked a few questions, such as : “How much traffic should we expect?, “How much traffic does our competitor receive”, “What traffic will I receive with an X amount of investment” and more similar questions. An SEO company also makes use of Website Traffic Estimators to track all the traffic coming to a website  The concept of forecasting is considered quite a difficult one, and if is done badly or in an improper way, it can be excessively misleading. Moreover, there are a number of really great visibility tools that are used by websites, but these tools choose not to speculate on traffic, and instead they estimate visibility based on ranking position and keyword volume/value. There are even a lot of estimated tools that apparently speculate on traffic, and also some well-known SEO tools that have components within their suites that do the same and which makes us wonder a few things :

•    How accurate are traffic estimation tools ?
•    Do we have such websites on which traffic estimation is more accurate than the others ?

Conducted A Test

In order to put accuracy to the test, here is what a team actually did :

•    They took organic visit data for almost a range of 25 websites to which they had access to via Google Analytics, for around three to four months. They made UK organic traffic their priority and looked at it exclusively because according to their evaluation some of the traffic estimation tools segments traffic by region, and they do not always cover territory. Moreover, they involved root domains in their analysis because not all the tools that they used in the test deal with subdomains. 

•    This team selected only those sites that cover a range of verticals, target audiences and purposes, while they did not disclose any of those selected sites. Although they hoped that their varied selection of websites will give out some trends where certain tools were more or less accurate for the estimation of certain kinds of websites traffic levels. 

•    Analyzed those 25 varied websites with 3 tools known as SimilarWeb, Ahrefs and SEMrush. The team recorded organic traffic estimate numbers for each of those 25 websites, but their focus still remained on the UK traffic. 

•    Lastly, they measured actual traffic with against estimated traffic for each of the 3 tools.

Even before the results were shared, one real prediction was made which meant that the tools would somehow be successful in underestimating organic traffic. Just because, these traffic estimator tools have limited indexes and they only have the ability to track a limited number keywords, that is why they can’t be totally relied upon for accurate estimated traffic. This is the reason why the best SEO companies do not totally rely upon these traffic estimators nowadays.

The Results

•    As a result the most accurate tool analysed was SimilarWeb which on an average overestimated organic traffic by 1%. Out of those three tools, SimilarWeb was the only one to overestimate traffic. While SEMrush was found to be the least accurate tools, because it underestimated the total traffic for all the 25 websites. 

•    The site which received the maximum amount of actual traffic, was quite differently estimated by all the three tools. Ahrefs proved out to be the most accurate tool for estimating the traffic of high traffic websites.