Benchmarking with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics solution which gives you lots of data about the traffic to your website. What’s in it for Google? Plenty. With your permission, Google collects and aggregates data from your site and many more, gaining useful information for its own decision making.
Google will share some of this data with you, too, in the form of benchmarks.
When you enable benchmarking, Google will show you how your site compares with other sites of the same size, or others in your category. Categories include things like Real Estate and Culinary Training. Google will show you benchmarks and how you compare in these metrics:
- Visits (how many visitors you have at your site)
- Bounce Rate (what percentage of visitors come to a page and then bounce away without exploring further)
- Average Time on Site (how long, on average, visitors spend at your site)
- Page Views (how many pages have been viewed by your visitors)
- Page Views Per Visit (how many pages, on average, each visitor looks at)
- Percent of New Visits (what percentage of your visitors are new to the site)
For example, you can see how many visits your site receives, and how many visits other sites like yours receive, so that you can determine whether you’re doing better than average or worse.
The first question for any site owner has to be: is it worth sharing my data? After all, we’re not talking about freely given information about everyone in cyberspace. If Google’s benchmarking were just a collection of data you could look at the way you can look at average height or average income, it might be worth examining just out of curiosity. It doesn’t work that way. You can only check out the benchmark information if you’re willing to pool your own data. And then of course you’re looking at others who have agreed to do the same. You are comparing your site to others who have installed analytics and enabled benchmarking, not to every site in your category.
So what can benchmarking do for you?
For a small site, possibly not much. Benchmarks for small sites tend to be extremely low (at this writing, for example, 5 to 10-page sites are benchmarked at an astonishingly low 11 visits per month). Unless you just want to congratulate yourself, this information won’t provide much additional data for you. Choosing a category can help with this, if your site fits into one of the categories included, but the numbers still tend to be quite low.
Larger sites seem more likely to gain useful data; at least for some metrics, sites of 500 pages or more seem less inclined to show the Lake Woebegone Effect (where everyone is above average).
There may be a circular element to this problem. That is, since small sites don’t get much out of benchmarking, owners of small sites may be less willing to share their data for the sake of the benchmarks. This could lead to a smaller pool of sites, and therefore to less reliable data. More webmasters willing to share their information could then lead to more useful data for the group as a whole.
At the very least, benchmarking is an interesting concept. For owners of larger sites, it can provide a standard against which to measure progress.
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