Competitor Traffic Analysis, Find the Channel Where Your Rivals Actually Win

Most competitor research stops at a snapshot. You pull one report, note who leads, and move on. That tells you who is big. It does not tell you where a competitor set is genuinely strong versus where it is simply coasting on scale, and those are two different maps. This is a method for reading the second one.

01What is a traffic sweet spot?

A traffic sweet spot is the single channel where a company draws a higher share of its visits than its market does on average, the place it over-indexes against its peers. It is not the channel that sends the most raw traffic. A giant can lead every channel by absolute volume and still have no sweet spot of its own, because its lead simply mirrors the market. The sweet spot is a relative signal. It shows where a business has built an advantage the rest of the field has not matched.

That distinction matters because raw leaderboards mislead. The biggest player almost always tops the totals, so a totals table just re-confirms who is biggest. Indexing against the market average strips scale out of the picture and leaves you with the interesting question: who wins where they had no right to?

02How do you run a competitor traffic analysis?

A competitor traffic analysis is a four-step workflow in Semrush Market Explorer that turns a raw peer group into a per-channel over-index reading. You define the peer group, pull traffic by channel, index each domain against the market average, then read the result. The method holds for any industry, which is the whole point. Swap the domains and the same four steps run again.

The two entry points differ in scope. Custom Market List caps at 100 domains and is the right tool when you know your exact competitive set. Analyze Category reaches up to 1,000 domains inside a predefined Semrush industry, better when you want the full field and do not yet know who the players are. We cover the Market Explorer setup itself in more depth in our Semrush Market Explorer guide.

03What does the method look like on real data?

Applied to the global online marketplaces, the method reveals a market almost entirely governed by one player on volume and wide open on two channels. We ran it across the top marketplace domains using Semrush.Trends data for the window February 2022 to March 2024. The totals confirmed the obvious. The per-channel read is where it got interesting.

By raw volume, Amazon leads 6 of the 8 channels. That is the totals story, and on its own it says only that Amazon is enormous. The exceptions are what a challenger should read first.

Two channels are not Amazon’s. Paid Search and Display both go to Mercado Livre. Hold that thought, because those two channels are exactly where the market as a whole is thin.

04Where is the marketplace sweet spot?

The open ground in global marketplaces is Paid Search and Display, two channels that carry under 1% of market traffic each and are led by a challenger, not the giant. Here is the shape of it. The market runs on Direct at 60.6% and Organic Search at 24.9%, roughly 85% of all traffic between them, and both are Amazon-locked. Fighting Amazon there is a losing proposition. You are attacking its fortress with its own weapons.

Now look at the channels nobody has locked down. Paid Search and Display each sit under 1% of total market traffic, and even the leader there, Mercado Livre, holds only about 15%. That is a channel with no dominant owner, low market saturation, and a challenger already proving it can be won. For a business without Amazon’s brand gravity on Direct, that is where a paid budget buys share instead of just renting attention.

Note the window. All of these figures cover February 2022 to March 2024, and marketplace behaviour shifts. The numbers are a dated worked example. The method that produced them does not expire.

05How do you replicate this for your own market?

You replicate a competitor traffic analysis by swapping the peer group and running the same four steps unchanged. Marketplaces were the example, not the limit. A fashion retailer running it against Zalando, Farfetch and Zozo surfaces a different open channel than a B2B materials supplier running it against its industrial field. The method is identical; the sweet spot moves with the market. Drop your own set of up to 100 domains into a Custom Market, or pick your Semrush industry category, and the workflow reads the same: pull traffic by channel, index each domain against the market average, find where the field under-invests.

The output is a decision, not a chart. It tells you which channel to defend because you already over-index there, and which channel to attack because the whole market has left it open. For most businesses the second answer is the valuable one. It is the channel your budget can actually move.

06Run it on your competitor set

We build this analysis for clients as a fixed piece of work: your peer group, your channels, the over-index read, and a one-page call on where to spend. If you want the sweet spot for your own market rather than the marketplace example above, we are glad to run it.

Get in touch and tell us your competitor set. We will show you where it is genuinely strong and where the open ground sits.