Google Analytics Launches Benchmarking
Google Analytics has launched an interesting new section called Benchmarking and I have been playing with it our some of our clients sites today. Benchmarking compares how one website’s statistics compare against aggregate data from sites of similar sizes within an industry Industry category. The statistics compared are the number of visits, Page Views, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rates, Average Time on Site and New Visits data - it’s all pretty cool.
Nit picking you would say that the negative points would be that the comparative statistics are only against other websites that have chosen to enable data sharing in Google Analytics for this purpose - so those sites that don’t regularly check their analytics or are not proactive, or use other systems, will not be shown. The other potential problem being which industry category your site is compared to. Although you can chose your industry category from a pretty extensive list the categories are still quite broad for our clients, for example, two of the sites I looked at were both hostel sites and they fit into the “hotels and accommodations” category, which seems a bit broad.
One of the nice uses I see however will be to provide a sanctity check when you think things might be really good or vice versa. For example, if you have a month where you are experiencing much less visits you can at least draw some comparisons from the rest of the broader industry according to the Google Benchmarking tool to see how the rest of the industry is fairing.
Below is a screen shot of how the Benchmarking tool looks: