Have you ever wondered how your competitors drive traffic to their pages? Or how they choose the focus of their digital campaigns? With Traffic & Market Toolkit’s Top Pages Dashboard, you can satisfy your marketing curiosity and use the insights to tune up your strategy.
In this post, we’ll explore eight interesting ways you can use Top Pages to gain competitive insights and how those insights can give you an edge as you strive to outperform your competitors.
1. The Possible Number of Your Competitors’ Customers
Among all of the top pages, you may be the most interested in those that have “cart,” “basket,” “pay,” “trial,” and “free trial” in their URLs.
Remember that users can reach these pages both internally and externally (with an abandoned cart notification, their browser’s autocomplete or with a link to the cart that their friends or family had shared).
For example, here is a snapshot of Sephora’s funnel: we see the number of unique users that put something in the basket, got to the checkout, and then confirmed the purchase.
The numbers gradually decline as users work through the sales funnel. This is normal to a certain extent–not everyone who puts an item in their cart will make a purchase–but an extreme discrepancy could indicate an issue.
2. Maximum Potential Audience of Your New Product/Service
If you’re planning to launch a specific new product or test some parameters in an upcoming promotion, you should examine your rival’s top pages that belong to similar campaigns. Perhaps you can discover some techniques to apply to your own business.
How Much Traffic Did They Generate?
Check your top-performing competitor to get an idea of your maximum possible reach. Gain some insights to determine if their audiences were engaged in a particular piece of content on the website.
You can see how many unique users went directly to the Hubspot’s blog and check the most popular articles.
What Traffic Sources Did They Use to Market a Similar Product or Service?
By filtering out historical data, you can uncover the outputs of each channel over time, allowing you to determine your approximate investment in them.
We’ve got a real-world example of how Macy’s generates traffic to their women’s clothes section:
Notice their women’s clothing page has a blend of traffic sources. Direct accounts for over half of the page’s traffic, with search and referral traffic making up the majority of the remaining visits. If you were to launch a women’s clothing line, you might model your web strategy off of Macy’s, or try something different to gain an edge.
3. Newly Added, Growing, and Declining Pages
Using the Trending Pages block of the Top Pages Dashboard, you can uncover newly added pages, or older pages that are rapidly growing or declining in popularity. The tool allows you to filter by category and traffic type to narrow your analysis.
Tracking these pages can provide a variety of insights into your competitor's strategies, including:
- New Products
- Changes in pricing
- Audience targeting shifts
- Emerging or fading promo campaigns
For example, when selecting “Newly Detected” pages for Sephora.com, we discover product landing pages that promote lip serum, liquid contour, and eye stylus shadow sticks.
Below the Trending Pages block, the Top Pages list can also reveal pages that Google doesn’t index. These could be landing pages made for PPC campaigns, which can make perfect examples to study the effectiveness of marketing channels.
Visit these top pages and see what structure, design, and CTAs your competitors used. This research can inform your own campaigns and landing pages.
You can also use the 1Y trend column to see what pages are gaining traction and which pages are on the decline. For example, the pages on thinning hair treatments, pick up and delivery options, and skincare routines, have seen noticeable increases over the past couple months.
Analyzing the introduction of new pages along with their growth and decline over time can help you assess how your competitors think about the market, respond to market trends, and pivot as conditions change. This behind-the-scenes look can help inform your strategy looking toward the future.
4. Your Competitors’ Top Products or Services
Which of your rivals’ pages do you think generated the most traffic? Probably, those that devoured a big part of the marketing budget and initially contained the most exciting products or services for the target audience.
Pay attention to the top pages that represent your competitor’s specific products or product categories. Study what traffic sources your rival leverages. Then, consider adding similar pages to your own campaign, or, to the contrary, focus on promoting the rest of your product range.
The latter case might be a reasonable strategy at times and won’t escalate competition.
For instance, the list of top pages of Coursera reveals that the most promoted and most visited pages are professional certificates for Google Data Analytics, Google Project Management, Google UX Design, and Google Cybersecurity.
You can dive deeper and find the most popular items in specific categories or for different target audiences in the same way.
5. Top Content on Competitors’ Sites and Partners’ Media Platforms
This insight will be exceptionally valuable for content strategists and SEO specialists. The list of top pages can alert you to what pages you could add to the structure of your website. It can indicate which content you should focus on to generate and retain the most traffic.
Beginning broadly, look at the “Entrances” metrics associated with each top page. These numbers tell you which pages bring the most traffic to the site. Here’s an example from Sephora competitor Ulta.
Pages with high entrances indicate a clear appeal for users; they’ve entered the URL or followed a link to the page for a reason.
Now, you can look closer by exploring the topics other websites bet on in their seasonal and regular campaigns and reveal what channels they use for their successful promotion. You can gain insights based on this data that will help you plan an even better campaign for your own site, whether it be for general brand awareness or conversions.
The more traffic you receive, the more ultimate target actions you may have. If you search for blog-related URLs in the list of top pages, you will find out if and how your competitors invest in content creation and promotion. You may also find that this strategy isn't fruitful for your industry.
For example, email brings substantial traffic to its Birthday Gift page.
Finally, you can view these metrics for potential partners to discover their most externally visited pages. This can help you determine the type of content they like or may need before you reach out about a potential co-marketing relationship.
6. High-Priority Languages and Most Valuable Regional Markets
Let’s get even more detailed and find out the breakdown of traffic to your competitors’ top pages by country. Search for a URL that contains a country code. If a localized page or subdomain has made it to the global top, the named country is of great value to the business.
Once you’ve learned the number of unique visitors to this regional page, you can try to estimate the size of your competitor’s audience in this country. Then, analyze the traffic channels your competitors chose to promote each of these regional top pages.
Have a look at the example of Louis Vuitton and how its global audience impacts its business. The highlighted country codes represent the intended region for these pages.
Here we see a long list of localized pages that rise to the top of Louis Vuitton’s top pages list. Pages from the US, Australia, Japan, the UK, France, India, and Canada all appear. As a global designer brand, we can learn much about the industry by examining these metrics across various locations.
7. The Focus of Your Competitors’ Marketing Campaigns
After you have analyzed separate top pages inside and out, it is time to dig deeper. See if you can group these URLs under categories or detect any trends.
For example, perhaps several product pages made it to the top of the list in a specific period; this could mean their product category was the focus of a marketing campaign at a particular time.
If a company provides several services, consistent clusters of the same type top pages will help you detect what the company is most known for Zillow, for example, turns out to be more visited (and strongly promoted) for the purchase and sale of real estate, rather than listings for places to rent.
You may also find additional interesting trends by looking closely at campaigns. For example, do Zillow’s rental campaigns bring more traffic through referrals than their purchase pages? This information can clue you into their strategy and provide ideas for your own campaigns.
8. Changes in Consumer Strategy, Target Audience, and Product Range
After you have discovered a company’s key product or product category, see if they tend to change their strategy and positioning over time. Keep an eye on the fluctuation of traffic to the same-type pages. Let’s use Microsoft and its AI chatbot Copilot as an example.
In March 2024, the Copilot landing page was the chart's eighth most popular Top Page. Of its 19.2 million entrance sources, 97.9k came from paid search and 1.9k from display ads.
In March 2025, Microsoft has been actively promoting Copilot. In fact, Copilot is now the third most-visited page on the site. Entrance sources include 229.3k from paid search and 12.9k from display ads.
More Analytical Angles, More Insights for Your Strategy
As you can see through these eight examples, Top Pages Dashboard can reveal much more than simple visits to a website. When the various aspects of the tool are cross-examined, you can learn a great deal about competitor sales numbers, audience, products, and promotions. More broadly, you can understand what trends consumers are excited about in the market.
Taking these insights, you can improve on your own traffic generation strategies and ensure your site’s pages are optimized for success.
