Google Analytics has had its benchmarking service in beta for about a month now. It could prove to be your most important tool.
Benchmarking is really checking your site against your competition. This is important because you are comparing important metrics like traffic, page views, average time spent on site, and bounce rate. Knowing where you stand against your competition on these important metrics questions can help you better optimize and improve your website.
For instance, if you know that you average 10,000 visitors per month on your website but other sites of similar size and the same target market attract 15,000 visitors per month then you can know that you are behind the competition. But keep in mind that these numbers represent only the number of websites that are using the benchmarking service. So if it’s just you and one other competitor then the information may not be the best information you can get. But where else can you go to get a complete overview of your industry? There really is nowhere else.
Chances are, if your competition is using Google AdWords then they will benefit from benchmarking as much as you are. So if you know that your most important competitors are using Google AdWords and running Pay Per Click campaigns then it would behoove you to join the benchmarking service because they most likely are using it. The service doesn’t give you any details on your competitors, nor does it give competitors your information, but it does compare your site to the general trending of all of your competitors and your site combined. That’s pretty useful information and I highly recommend the benchmarking tool.
