A new tool for comparing marketing technologies

New 'SimilarTech' service promises to help marketers compare martech stacks

We love any tool which helps marketers do their jobs better, which is why we created an infographic breaking down 150 of the best marketing tools into 30 different categories. But we aren't the only ones. Some of the folks at SimilarWeb also looked at how to help marketers decide on what marketing tools to use, and came up with a clever new service which they've dubbed 'SimilarTech'. We chatted to Daniel Buchuk, SimilarTech's head of brand and strategy about their new feature, what inspired it and how it works.

As someone involved in the marketing technology industry, what did you make of Scott Brinker’s latest Martech graphic? 

Scott Brinker's market landscape graph is testament to the extraordinary evolution of this industry, featuring featured 350 companies in 2012 and over 3,500 companies in 2016. I can't think of many other industries showing tenfold growth in the past 4 years! This is fantastic for marketing professional as it brings unprecedented choice to optimize and manage all marketing output, campaigns and operations. However, choice also comes with challenges such choosing the right tools and platforms for your business - continuously assessing their relevancy and fit while staying alert for innovation. 

Did that sense of marketers being overwhelmed by the number of tools available contribute at all to the decision to create SimilarTech, or were there other reasons behind it? 

It is certainly one of the main reasons. It is very hard for marketers today to assess the
value of many of these platforms, especially when they're contacted by early-stage businesses with aggressive sales team that often over-promise and under-deliver. SimilarTech is a free tool for people to see instantly who's using these platforms and asses relevancy. Many of our users also find it really helpful for competitive analysis since they can look up any web-based platform used on their competitors' sites. 

So what is it that SimilarTech does, and how does this help marketers?

SimilarTech is designed to help both sides of the equation: marketers and technology-
owners. Marketers are able to gain insights to make informed decisions with solid understanding of market trends and adoption of specific technologies while the companies developing web-based technologies can find, qualify and connect with new companies based on their technology stack, location, web traffic and more.

Editor's note: You can see images of the tool in action below:

How do you get the data for SimilarTech?

We use state-of-the art crawling technology to scan every website for the technologies they use. Our crawlers are scaled massively to reach large portions of the internet on a daily basis to deliver always up to date and relevant data. 99.99% of active sites on the Web are detected and indexed in our database for real market share data with over 100 million web pages analyzed daily and over 1 billion data points collected every single day. Our challenge to process all this knowledge and turn it into relevant insights for marketers that need market insights and sales professionals that need to find and qualify new opportunities.

Did anything surprise you about how your customers use SimilarTech, did you get anyone using it for something you hadn’t considered when you created it?

We initially positioned SimilarTech as a tool for marketing and sales professionals to get market insights on technology usage and to generate and prospect leads based on companies their technology stack and online performance. Initially, we didn't consider marketing agencies as one of our potential customers, but we found that there's a huge demand all over the world for digital marketing agencies to use our insights to target publishers in specific territories, business verticals and using a defined set of advertising platforms.