Google Analytics Offers Free Benchmarking Service

Google has recently announced the addition of analytic benchmarks to their Google Analytics service. This free service will require Google Analytics customers to opt in to “share the account data in an anonymous, aggregated format”.

Reporting will be limited in the beta version of this service. Benchmark metrics include: Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits. Your data will be measured against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites in your chosen vertical. Benchmark data will highlight strength’s and weaknesses compared to other websites in your market.

This new Google Analytics Benchmarking Service is located under the “Visitors” section of your Google Analytics reports. Simply select “Benchmarking” to view the report. Google notes that it may take up to two weeks for the data to appear since it will need to be categorized and collected to establish vertical benchmarks.

To enable the benchmarking service for your account, your Google Analytics account administrator must first opt in. In order to do this, select the option to share your Analytics data from the Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings page.

To get to this page, click the link that says “Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings” from the Analytics Settings page. One important thing to consider before opting in to share data is that if you opt in benchmarking will be enabled for all profiles in your account. Since the selection is at the account level, you cannot enable individual profiles while enabling others.

Both old and new Google Analytics customers may opt in to benchmarking without changing their existing analytics tags. Whether you’ve installed the older version of the tracking code (urchin.js) or the newer one (ga.js), you do not have to switch versions in order for benchmarking to work in your account.

Choosing a vertical to be benchmarked against is a simple matter. To change the industry vertical you want to compare your site against, navigate to the category picker from the Benchmark report by following these steps:

1. Log in to Google Analytics.
2. In the Visitors section, select Benchmarking.
3. On the Benchmarking report page, click “Open category list” to expand the list of categories.
4. Click the vertical you wish to compare your website against, then click “Select Category” to save your changes.
5. The report will automatically populate the graphs.

After enabling benchmarking, Google crawls the websites in the account then categorizes them by vertical and the amount of visits. For sites of a similar size, a category of industry verticals can be chosen when there is a sufficient number of accounts in that category. You can compare your website against any available category. Profiles within an account are categorized separately.

Each category can have anywhere from 100 to hundreds of thousands of websites per category, but there is a minimum of 100 accounts in each benchmarking category. The number of actual website may vary since many accounts will have multiple websites and new accounts are always being accepted into the benchmarking service.

Sites of similar sizes are grouped together under three classifications: small, medium, and large. This classification is based on the Visitors metric. In this manner, you will be benchmarked and compared to other similarly sized sites. You will not able to view benchmarking data for sites in other size classifications within your vertical. The benchmarking service will automatically check the latest number of visitors for each site to adjust the benchmarking data accordingly. As more sites participate, a wider variety of categories will be available in the benchmarking report. Google will limit the effects of ancillary sites from the aggregate data in each category to help ensure that the benchmarking data is most representative of the category you choose to compare your site against.

Much like Fireclick’s Index, Google Analytics’ new benchmarking service will be another tool in the data analysis box. How useful that tool will be remains to be seen, but no one can argue with the free price or good intentions.