*Clarity In Marketing

Users of Google Analytics can now benchmark their website’s performance against other Google Analytics users providing a context for understanding how their site is performing.

By opting to anonymously share your data with Google you can now compare the performance of your site against sites of a similar size (judged by visits). You can further refine this by selecting industry or regional categories. This is potentially very valuable management information as it can provide actionable insights based on how your site is performing in comparison to the market on a number of key metrics:

• Visits;
• Bounce rates;
• Page views;
• Average time on site;
• Pages per visit; and
• New visits.

Is Google Analytics industry benchmarking as good as it sounds?

While this is the type of web data MDs will love - they are a competitive bunch after all, as with any benchmarking you need to look at the relevancy of the data it’s based on.

In this case the data is based on users of free service which may skew the data towards the smaller, less professional end of the market. Furthermore, the service is new (March 2008) so data may not be expansive as yet though “… each category can have anywhere between 100 and hundreds of thousands of websites per category.” according to Google’s website.

Overall, Google Analytics Benchmarking – which is currently in beta – has a great deal of promise which will attract serious marketors to participate. It will be interesting to monitor the data over the next few months and see how and if that promise is fulfilled. For now, I’d certainly give it a go – I just wouldn’t tell your MD until you’ve had time to assess it.

If you’d like to know how to utilise marketing metrics to improve the performance of your marketing give Clarity a call.