Site Benchmarking with Google Analytics

Posted on | April 28, 2008 | Comments Off

Last month Google announced the release of a beta version of industry benchmarking. This recent feature allows Google Analytics users to measure their site’s performance against others in their market as well as seeing how one particular niche compares to others in a specific industry.

You have to opt in to the service and once you do you can find it in your site stats navigation under the “Visitors” section. In this section there are a variety of charts that show your site’s traffic in blue compared against other sites, which are shown in gray. This allows you to see data such as if visitors stay longer on your pages versus other pages in markets similar to yours or you can compare your daily traffic changes with that of your industry to see if your ups and downs are occurring across the board.

The entire program is anonymous and therefore the information you se is an aggregated total rather than just information from one site. Google is hoping that this data, which was a commonly requested thing, will provide insights to users that have been previously unseen.

This benchmarking has at least one stipulation though. It only works if companies chose to share their data with the system. For that Google also introduced a new data-sharing setting page. If you chose to share your information it isn’t shown individually at any point. It’s simply collected and shared anonymously as was previously mentioned.

Category: Web 2.0 Tools

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