The-Complete-Guide-For-Building-and-Tracking-Audience-Growth-May-2021-1.pdf

Audience Analysis Guide | 1
GUIDE
Audience Growth:
The Industry-Leading Playbook
for Researchers
May 2021

Session duration
Exploring audience demographics
Bounce rate
Audience geography
Market trend analysis
What’s Inside
Audience engagement rate
Brand loyalty
Introduction
Analyzing industry trends
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Audience Growth: The Complete Guide | 3
● 3 steps to target a variety
of audiences
● Key demographic breakdown
Part 1
Exploring audience
demographics ● Optimizing your audience reach

In this playbook, we’ll give you essential tools to gain a better
understanding of your target market and how to engage
them. Your goal is to drive more loyal business your way.
Read the guide to learn how to:
● Identify your audience by demographics and
behaviors
● Measure and track key metrics for market growth
● Leverage benchmarking and loyal audience
measurements to increase your reach
Bonus
Enjoy tips from Similarweb experts, including detailed steps
to help you put your audience-based insights into action.
Introduction

Market research vs. digital intelligence - what’s the difference?
Measuring Audience Behavior
Determine the demographic makeup of an audience relative to competition;
Identify the sites they are visiting and the content they ﬁnd most engaging.
Building your Marketing Strategy
Evaluate the effectiveness of your competitors’ audience acquisition;
Determine the channels and approaches you can leverage most eﬃciently.

Targeting your audience on social media
Spend some time deciding where you want to be on social media
and why. Finding the right social media platforms for your
audience and your content is crucial.
Focus your attention and double down on marketing efforts that
engage your audience on the most suitable platform for your
business.
Keep in mind that age and content type matter on social.
Understanding where the different age groups socialize and what
to post where will help you determine which platforms to include
in your marketing mix:
Pro Tip
Figure out the content your audience generally
consumes. For example: Young and
middle-aged men like sports and car-related
sites, and women of all ages usually prefer
lifestyle, personal blogging, fashion sites.
TikTok
for very young audiences (e.g. teenagers)
video content required
Twitter
for young male audiences
multiple posts per day recommended
Facebook
for age groups 30 and higher
diverse mix of content recommended
Instagram
primarily for millennials and Gen X
visual platform, not ideal for link conversion
LinkedIn
for ages 25-50 with higher education
for employee advocacy & thought leadership
YouTube
for all ages
original video required & strong for SEO growth

Website specific demographics
The study of demographics is a statistical representation of the
population. Essentially you’re looking to gain insights into the
population in a given area and looking at different qualities and
metrics within that group.
For website demographics, we have a more defined location — your
website and a subject group made up of your visitors and users.
Therefore, understanding your users' location, age, and gender is
crucial for defining your target audience on a basic level.
Now let’s take it one step further and look at marketing channels,
devices, interests, and purchase behavior for website
demographics.

Deﬁning different demographics and examples
Gender – Male vs. Female vs. Prefer not to respond
Different behaviors and interests based on gender can impact language,
images, and media on your website and how/where you advertise.
Age – Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z
Knowing your website audience's age groups helps you speak their
language and which features to focus on.
Desktop vs. Mobile
A key indicator of choosing functionalities and how to display your content.
Marketing Channels
This helps you identify where and how to reach your audience.
Purchasing Behaviors
Some people are spontaneous buyers; others are more hesitant. Optimize
your buyer journey with these insights.

What is a good session duration?
According to Databox, most digital marketers report an average
session duration of 2-3 minutes, but that doesn’t mean it’s relevant
for every industry.
To evaluate performance, you need to benchmark your digital
performance against businesses striving for similar goals. If you
have a content-heavy site with lots of professional articles and
videos, you would expect a much longer session duration than a
brand awareness site for a physical retail store. An interactive app
is a different story altogether and would need to look into
competitive businesses to understand how to measure above
average session duration.
Let’s take a look at the average visit duration per key industries,
according to Similarweb data. See the averages on the right for a
few examples.

Using Similarweb to optimize your online audience reach
Similarweb's Website Demographics feature
allows you to:
● Benchmark your audience to better understand your
strengths and opportunities.
● Monitor your market share across segments.
● Optimize user acquisition, partnerships, and brand
awareness efforts towards your relevant audience with the
right messaging and targeting.

How to use Similarweb's Audience Demographics feature
In Website Analysis, you can type the domain address
you would like to analyze.
Then, Navigate to the Demographics feature under the
Audience section to view the age and gender
breakdowns of your website’s audience.
Take a look at how your competitors and
industry-leaders stack up.
See the breakdown of male vs female and age-based
insights.
Filter by mobile vs desktop to see the difference and
identify trends by ﬁltering by region and overtime.
Pro Tip
Demographics can help companies and
advertisers to reﬁne their marketing strategy
and help identify cross-industry trends.
Try it on out on Similarweb!
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Part 2
Session Duration :
The what and why of a good session

What is session duration and what does it tell you?
A session begins when a visitor arrives at your website and ends
when they exit or remain inactive for a predetermined period. As
long as the visitor interacts with your site, the session continues.
To determine session duration, Google Analytics – the industry
standard for tracking on-site data – relies on page visits (or ‘hits’)
within your site. This means that if a user didn’t interact with the
page last visited, the time spent on that page is excluded from the
session.
Session duration is an indicator that your audience is engaged.
Pro Tip
Combine session duration data with other key
metrics to ﬁgure out how to keep your
audience’s interest longer.

5 tips to increase average session duration for your website or app
A session begins when a visitor arrives at your website and ends
when they exit or remain inactive for a predetermined period. As
long as the visitor interacts with your site, the session continues.
To determine session duration, Google Analytics – the industry
standard for tracking on-site data – relies on page visits (or ‘hits’)
within your site. This means that if a user didn’t interact with the
page last visited, the time spent on that page is excluded from
the session.
Session duration is an indicator that your audience is engaged.
Pro Tip
Combine session duration data with other key
metrics to ﬁgure out how to keep your
audience’s interest longer.
40% of content creators say that visuals, like
infographics, drive the most engagement.

Why trafﬁc and engagement metrics are important
Use key traﬃc and engagement metrics to:
• Gain an overview of a brand’s digital market share
• Reveal a brand’s user acquisition strategies
• Determine how a brand compares to its competitors
• Understand how well a brand is performing according to its
visitor reach and engagement
• Discover trends and seasonality
• Gain insights into audience behavior over time and across
granular time frames (daily, weekly, monthly)

Using Similarweb’s key trafﬁc and engagement metrics
Step 1: Build your analysis
Type in any domain and add competitor sites to compare.
Step 2: Benchmark against the competition
Analyze total visits in percentages, absolute numbers, or per device, and
compare to other brands.

Using Similarweb’s key trafﬁc and engagement metrics (cont.)
Step 3: Understand visitor quality
Compare monthly visits, unique visitors, visits per unique user, and
engagement metrics.
Step 4: Reveal changes in audience reach
See engagement trends over varying periods.

Part 3
Calculating your audience’s
engagement rates

How do you measure engagement rate?
Engagement rate formula for social media
Engagement metrics are super transparent on social; any type of
interaction with your content is considered engagement. This
covers likes, shares, comments, re-tweets, etc.
Engagement rate formula for websites and apps
The definition of an engaged user differs per industry and business
type. To figure out what works for you, define the value your
customers are getting and how you measure it.
For example, you may want your users to explore your online
tutorials – that’s your offered value. Monitor and track how many
new free users access tutorials, then check if the percentage of
users who sign up after reading your tutorials is higher than that of
users who didn’t.

2 ways to measure engagement rate effectively
Measuring engagement rate by time
For apps: Deﬁne active users and track daily, weekly, or monthly
engagement. Apply the engagement formula and check the
percentage of users who remain over time.
For websites: Frequently used metrics include visits/unique
visitors, average visit duration, average pages/visits, and bounce
rate.
Measuring engagement rate by marketing mix
Understand the impact of your marketing channels:
• Direct traﬃc
• Paid search
• Social media
• Referrals
• Email
Divide your users into separate cohorts based on marketing
channels. Track each cohort’s engagement rate over time.
Understand where your most valuable customers come from and
which marketing channel generates long-term, high-value
customers.

Why your user engagement matters
On a website or app, users show up for a speciﬁc purpose.
Retaining them depends on the value your customer ﬁnds in your
service.
Engagement rates measure how well their expectations are
being met over time.
Monitoring engagement rates helps you determine the level of
customer satisfaction and identify potential churns.
A low engagement rate may signify a mismatch between what
the user expects and what you offer. This lets you adapt your
content or user experience to provide better value to your
customers, so they continue using your product or service.
Pro Tip
The value you can provide varies throughout
the customer lifecycle, so it’s important to
measure the engagement rate of users who
signed up at the same time.

What is a good engagement rate?
To assess a good engagement rate for you, you need to
benchmark your website against your competition and compare
stages in the life cycle.
When it comes to social media, the numbers are more
comparable.
• On Facebook, the average engagement rate is 0.09%.
• Engagement on Instagram was signiﬁcantly higher last year,
with an average engagement rate of 1.6% but only 0.18% in
2020.
• Twitter shows an average engagement rate of only 0.045%.
Keep in mind that these are overall average rates. To get a better
picture, check the average for your speciﬁc industry or category.
Pro Tip
Monitor over different periods to take into
account sudden engagement spikes from
marketing campaigns.

Part 4
Bounce rate:
Everything you need to know and more

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who left your site without
interacting. Each visitor who leaves your website from the same page
they entered, without watching a video, clicking ‘read more’ or
clicking-through to another page counts as a ‘bounce.’
How is bounce rate calculated?
Analytics software calculates the bounce rate by dividing
single-interaction visits by total visits to your site. In other words, it’s a
percentage of the total visits during a set period.
Bounce Rate =
Understanding bounce rate
To use this metric eﬃciently, you can measure and track bounce rates
for speciﬁc pages or page groups. This is critical for understanding
how people interact and is helpful when optimizing your site.

What is a good engagement rate?
Pro Tip
Compare your bounce rate to other websites
providing similar services in your industry.
The goal is usually to have a low bounce rate, like in limbo; it’s a
balancing act to see how low you can go. But what qualifies low?
Generally, you should expect your website’s bounce rate to be
anywhere between 26%-70%, with an average between 45%-65%
(lower average for eCommerce).
Why do average bounce rates vary by industry?
A visitor's intention to an eCommerce site, news, blog, or dictionary
is entirely different. An eCommerce site visitor is like a customer in
a store. They shop around before buying or leaving. People looking
for a specific piece of information or content will leave right after
they find just that.

How can you lower your bounce rate?
Here are some tips and tools to reduce your bounce
rate:
● Format your content and make sure it’s high-quality. You
can test how readable your site is with WebFX’s
readability test tool.
● Make your CTA buttons straightforward and to the point.
Customers who don’t grasp what the product is are
usually the most likely to bounce.
● Page load time matters. Improve it to increase your
traﬃc and customer satisfaction. Google’s page speed
tester can help you check this.
● A/B test creative assets and campaigns to see what your
audience engages with the most. Try Hotjar, a user
behavior recording tools that monitor your visitors’
on-site reactions.
● Add live chat to your website and connect with visitors to
help them navigate to where they want to go.

Part 5
What your audience geography tells you
about your market?

Figuring out where your target audience lives, eats, and works as well
as how to create a marketing presence in those regions, is crucial to
building a target market in the right locations. How to do it:
• Analyze your audience’s geography to ensure you’re reaching the
right geographical areas.
• Pinpoint the markets with the most site visitors and correlate the
data with your conversion rates in those areas.
• Get an idea of behavioral patterns according to region. For
example, research shows the majority of consumers accept terms
and conditions without reading them. Yet 82% of Germans will read
the terms & conditions when making a purchase.
• Use additional engagement metrics – such as visit duration, mobile
vs. desktop split, and bounce rate – to ﬁgure out why some regions
underperform. Learn which channels work better where and
understand how your competitors attract new customers.
Understanding your target audience: A lesson in geography

Hack #1: Maximize your geographical reach
Find out how relevant your strategy and content are to a speciﬁc
geographical location and culture. For instance, check which search
engines, social platforms, and devices are most popular locally. Look
at the demographic distribution for local users.
Hack #2: Expand your business into new markets
Use Audience Geography to investigate your site or app’s relevance in
regions outside of your primary market. Find out if and how well you
attract audiences in places you haven’t targeted yet.
Hack #3: Plan for international growth
Check online payment methods and software availability, as well as
which marketing channels you’ve included in your marketing mix.
Also, look over your content and research cultural preferences to
make sure they align. Make adjustments and changes accordingly.
3 growth hacks for gauging your website’s audience geography

Segment your target market and create a region-specific
marketing plan based on your audience geography
analysis by:
• Formulating a segmented target market according to geographical
location and audience behavior. Include geo-parameters.
• Run A/B tests to get a feel for localized search intent. Adapt your
SEO strategy and PPC ads to include the optimized keywords and
paid ads that will bring results.
• Include customized content and distribute it through acquisition
channels that deliver the best results in a any given geographical
area.
• Identify culturally-specific consumer trends and apply them to
become relevant locally. This can open doors to new markets.
• You may stumbled upon an unexpected growth opportunity if you
get a sizable amount of visitors from a region you didn’t anticipate.
Add the new location to your defined target markets and develop a
geo-specific digital marketing strategy.
Tips for geographic marketing customization: Leveraging data analytics

Use Similarweb’s analytics software to take you to your
geo-targeting for different types of target markets.
Collect information about your competition and benchmark their
performance against yours to help identify target markets.
Discover which channels have low competition in different
regions.
Test which channels and campaigns work best and continue to
monitor the data to reﬁne your strategy over time.
Make your geo audience analysis work for you.
As your business expands over the globe, audience geography
becomes increasingly signiﬁcant. Advanced analytics, including
market research and Similarweb benchmark analysis, provide vital
information for understanding local markets.
How to use Similarweb's Geography Analytics

Part 6
Market Trend Analysis:
deﬁnition and examples

Competing in a modern business environment: What it means and how to do it right?
Pro Tip
Depending on your KPIs, you can benchmark
against your direct competition, the
best-in-class, or the entire industry. Create a
separate report for each goal.
Competitive benchmarking is the part of your business plan that
puts everything you do in perspective. It lets you evaluate your
market position accurately. You can identify emerging trends,
potential threats, and promising opportunities, both in existing and
new markets.
The process of benchmarking includes these four steps:
1. Choose KPIs that support business goals
2. Deﬁne the competition based on KPIs
3. Determine the metrics that support KPIs
4. Track and monitor performance over time
Gain an industry overview with Web
Category Analysis

The importance of benchmarking against your main competitors and the industry
Detect trends in your industry
Benchmarking against your industry lets you assess your
position and detect market trends early by monitoring changes in
traffic and user engagement.
Understand your growth potential
Analyzing and benchmarking the quality of your competitors’
traffic provides insights about the efficiency of their digital
marketing activities. Gauge your growth potential, identify areas
for improvement, and recognize competitor strengths and blind
spots.
Pro Tip
If your competitors are seeing growth from a
specific demographic or geographic group you
should build that into your own marketing strategy.
Odds are that it will work for your business too.
Gauge the competition with Website Analysis

Spotting growth potential with Web Industry Analysis and Segment Analysis
Pro Tip
Use this indicator to gauge how relevant your
product is to audiences in your space. Toggle
the blue 'Compare' button in the top-left of the
graph to add up to an additional 10 segments
to compare in the same view.
Web Industry Analysis includes data for industry leaders and top websites,
based on Similarweb’s ranked website index and broken down by traffic
source. Use it to understand category-level industry trends or to discover
and qualify potential investments.
Segment Analysis allows you to create customized segments with the
highest level of granularity possible: users can create segments that are as
granular as ~0.1% of their site traffic.
You can deconstruct partner and competitor websites to benchmark
categories, lines-of-business or specific products with full flexibility and
accuracy. Isolate traffic and engagement metrics across sub-sections of
the website to evaluate your performance relative to your competitors.
Segment Analysis allows you to:
• Analyze website structure
• Add segment rules
• Gain insights into segment share, visits, page views, duration, bounce
rate, and more
• Measure the impact of marketing activities
• Share with your team

Part 7
Understanding and measuring brand loyalty

Why does brand loyalty matter?
Loyal consumers tend to return more often and for larger purchases
than other repeat customers.
One study found that a 3% increase in brand loyalty lowers the cost
of sales by 10%, and a 7% increase in loyalty can increase each
consumer’s lifetime spending by up to 85%. More importantly, it
turns them into brand advocates.
Brand advocates are the foundation of word-of-mouth marketing.
They’ll spread the word about your brand, leave reviews, and share
your content.
Seeing actual users recommend you as an authority builds trust
among potential new customers.
Audience loyalty helps you track and benchmark audience
performance for any website within your industry.
There are 5 main components:

Identifying and measuring brand loyalty
Brand loyalty can be broken down into six primary customer
behavior parameters:
Repeat Purchases – returning for the same product.
Expansion – purchasing other products from your brand.
Action – not looking for alternative suppliers.
Tolerance – forgiving poor service or mistakes.
Stated Preference – stating a preference when asked.
Revealed Preference – other behaviors reflected in the data.
To measure these behaviors, most marketers use a combination of
surveys and data analysis. Surveys and interviews are direct but
can be misleading.
Data, including both Google Analytics and more targeted loyalty
analysis tools, allow you to use information that reflects authentic
customer behavior. Combining the right metrics analytics can help
you figure out which specific actions signal brand loyalty or
approaching customer churn.
Pro Tip
Integrate a variety of metrics from different tools and
platforms, including Google Analytics and Similarweb,
to get an accurate picture of brand loyalty.

3 steps to understand audience loyalty in the Similarweb platform
To get started, search for your website in Website Analysis and go
to the Audience Loyalty tab.
In this example, we will use booking.com.
Step 1: See the loyalty % of your website’s audience
On this page, you can measure the audience loyalty of a website
against the industry average.
The graph below shows the % of website visitors who only visit the
selected site within a month or visit more than one site in the same
time frame.

3 steps to understand audience loyalty in the Similarweb platform (cont.)
Step 2: See the % change over time
Filter by date range and region to see how the average %
changes over time and across regions.
Step 3: See how you compare to your competitive set
Click the compare button, to benchmark your website’s
audience loyalty score against the competitive set and
see the difference between each player.

Part 8
Analyze industry trends using data
to drive your digital strategy

How To: Guide to getting started with Similarweb
Web Industry Analysis has several features such as Market
Quadrant Analysis, Industry Leaders, Industry Trends, and Market
Channels to help you understand how different markets are
performing over time and instantly evaluate key strategic business
questions such as:
• What is the size of a speciﬁc market?
• Who are the rising players?
• What are the market expansion opportunities?
• What are the risks or threats of launching a new product line into
a new market or region?
In this example, we will use Best Buy (a U.S. retailer) and how they
may evaluate market entry strategy into the German market for
e-Commerce and retail industry.

How to guide with Similarweb
Step 1: Understand the total addressable market in the
digital landscape
Using Industry Overview you can quickly see the total number of
visits to the industry during a speciﬁc time period. In this example,
we can see 17B searches of e-commerce in Germany which would
show Best Buy the market potential.
You can also ﬁlter by a period-over-period (PoP) change to see the
industry growth.
In this example, the industry increase by 5% a year, which indicated
a market worth investing in as there is growing consumer demand.

Step 2: Monitor industry leaders and emerging players
The Market Quadrant Analysis feature will help you see who are the
leaders in the market and you can sort by the monthly change to
see which players are growing the fastest in the market.

Step 3: Analyze the digital market share and react to
shifting industry dynamics
Industry Trends shows the top players and their traffic share. You
can filter by time to see if a market leader is growing in traffic share
or decreasing to enable you to make a decision on whether to enter
a fragmented market or whether there is an opportunity to seize
digital market share.

Step 4: See the growth of an industry per region
Navigate to the Audience Geography page to see how the industry
is growing per region. Filter to the growth tab to immediately see
how the market is growing or decline across different countries.

Step 5: Understand the market channel mix for the
industry to learn which channel to optimize and win
your market
Finally, Marketing Channels is also important because from a
market research perspective, if you are a company that doesn’t
traditionally invest in paid channel acquisition, this view shows you
the advertising spend within the industry to compare against your
digital strategy for a holistic view and see how other industry
players are optimizing the different channels with a bird’s eye view.
Read more about how to use Similarweb in our Knowledge Center.

Uncover more audience insights to
help you build and track your growth
Visit our website to ﬁnd out more
TRY SIMILARWEB TODAY

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