Google Analytics Benchmarking now live

26 Mar, 2008 | Google Analytics

In our last Google Analytics post we talked about the benefits of using Benchmarking data and how to set it up for your website. In this post we will investigate how to use the benchmarking data for better website performance.

Recap - What is Benchmarking?

In case you missed the previous article, the new benchmarking feature produces reports that "provide context to your Google Analytics data based on industry verticals so that you can gain more insights for your own business".

The Benchmarking feature is opt-in only. If you haven't enabled benchmarking for your account, but would like to do so, see this post.

Selecting an Industry Vertical to compare your site against

To select or change the industry vertical used in camparison with your site, click on the 'category picker' link within the Benchmark report by following the steps below:

1. Log in to your Analytics account.
2. Under the "Visitors" section, select Benchmarking (Beta).
   
   
3. Once you get to the Benchmarking report page, click "Open category list" to expand the list of categories.
   
   
4. Click the category you wish to compare your website against and then click "Select Category" to save your changes.
   
   
5. The report will automatically populate the graphs with your selected category's benchmark line.

Possible data uses

Comparing against different verticals

Try comparing your site against an industry vertical other than your own. For example, if you noticed the traffic in your industry declining at certain times of the year, whilst in comparison another industry is on the increase, using this information you may wish to explore cross promotional advertising/affliations to send traffic back and forth.

Trends in weekly traffic

The majority of websites we monitor tend to have weekly trends, such as a decline over the weekend followed by a steady rise during the first two days of the week and then platowing only to decline and repeat the process again.

For example, if you had a holiday website thats spiked on a monday morning you would be interested to see if this is a industry wide average. It's certainly worth noting if other businesses in your vertical have a different trend to your own, and then working out how they are recieving more traffic on the higher days.

Further Reading

Google Analytics

Benchmarking FAQs

Official Google Analytics Blog

Bookmark it!

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