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Google Analytics Benchmarking Service
By Rich Brooks
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-03-27
How do you compare to other Web sites in your industry?
It's fun and informative to review your Google Analytics reports to see how your Web site is fairing. Whether your traffic is going up or down, how people are finding you, what search terms they may be using, what your conversion rate is, etc. But a common question I'm often asked is "how do I compare to other nursing homes/psychologists/furniture makers?"
Until recently I've responded, "ummm...is that car on fire?" and then run away when they turned their head.
But now, Google Analytics, the free traffic reporting system from Google is offering benchmarking data so you can compare your results within your industry. The only cost...your soul! <Insert evil laugh here.>
Actually, just your data. And it's supposedly shared anonymously. (And if you can't trust a giant corporate with the motto "Don't Be Evil", who can you trust?)
Here's how you set up Benchmarking in Google Analytics:
Get a Google Analytics account up and running.
Click on "Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings" from the Google Analytics home page.
Choose "Share my Google Analytics data..." and then check off "Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking service." Save changes.
Once that's done you can log into the Web site's analytics you want to benchmark. Under Visitors you'll now find Benchmarking (beta).
First step is to choose your industry:
Once you do that you'll see the benchmarking results for a number of reports Google is including in this beta version. (I'm guessing they'll add more later on.)
When comparing flyte.biz to other "Web design and development" sites I can see that our visits and page views are better than average (+181.40%, +106.12%, respectively,) but the number of pages per visit and the average time on site are below average (-26.76% and -31.34%, respectively,) and our bounce rate is higher than the benchmark by nearly 20%. That means a lot of people are leaving after just one page.
I think part of this is due to the high percentage of traffic we get to our company and corporate logos page; it's got our highest page views, and our highest bounce rates. This page does especially well with the search engines, but I don't believe the people searching and finding it are finding what they were after.
I can also compare myself to other related industries, such as search engines (I'm assuming SEO companies, not Google) and email marketing companies. Unfortunately, I don't appear to be able to compare myself to multiple industries at the same time.
I'm also not sure how Google determines what industry flyte's in. Context, or is it based on the industry I choose? According to the help center: When benchmarking is enabled, Google crawls the websites in the account then categorizes them by vertical and the amount of visits. The data is then made anonymous through aggregation. How accurate is the data?
Well, it's only based on companies that are running Google Analytics and have opted into the benchmarking service, so it's not completely accurate. The more companies that share their data anonymously, the more accurate the data becomes.
Ultimately, I'm not concerned if my bounce rate is a little higher, or my page views are a little lower that my competition. These are only indicators. What I'm more interested in is how many projects we're signing, how much it costs to run our business, and how profitable we are at the end of the year. I'm also concerned about employee, client and vendor happiness/satisfaction, but these are harder to measure. It's more anecdotal.
In any case, if you've wondered how you stack up against the competition, this benchmarking tool will give you some good basic information.
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About the Author:
Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web site design and Internet marketing company in Portland, Maine. Flyte works with small businesses to build professional Web sites that often include e-commerce, Flash and content management systems. They promote their clients' sites through search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, business blogs and podcasts, and viral marketing.
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