Website traffic measurement and rankings: competitive intelligence tools examination

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine and verify the competitive intelligence tools Alexa and SimilarWeb, which are broadly used for website traffic data estimation. Tested tools belong to the state of the art in this area.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use quantitative approach. Research was conducted on a sample of Czech websites for which there are accurate traffic data values, against which the other data sets (less accurate) provided by Alexa and SimilarWeb will be compared.FindingsThe results show that neither tool can accurately determine the ranking of websites on the internet. However, it is possible to approximately determine the significance of a particular website. These results are useful for another research studies which use data from Alexa or SimilarWeb. Moreover, the results show that it is still not possible to accurately estimate website traffic of any website in the world.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitation of the research lies in the fact that it was conducted solely in the Czech market.Originality/valueSignificant amount of research studies use data sets provided by Alexa and SimilarWeb. However, none of these research studies focus on the quality of the website traffic data acquired by Alexa or SimilarWeb, nor do any of them refer to other studies that would deal with this issue. Furthermore, authors describe approaches to measuring website traffic and based on the analysis, the possible usability of these methods is discussed.