Go Beyond Google Analytics to Google Benchmarking

If you are using Google Analytics like I am for your small business website (it’s free), I hope you are getting the monthly reports and using them to improve your website and it’s performance. However, Google Analytics only allows you to compare your business website’s performance against itself from month to month and year to year.

With Google’s new service, Google Benchmarking, you finally have the opportunity to compare your website performance against your competitors. Every time a competitor signs up for Google Benchmarking, it adds another site’s statistics to help you compare your site to others in your industry.

Information is power. And the addition of this kind of information will give you more power to improve your website and make more money from it. By the way, all information collected by Google is anonymous so no one knows where the information came from. This protects everyone involved. And, of course, Google will use the information to help it develop better products and services. Everybody wins.

The following copy is Google’s description of the service:

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

This service is located under the “Visitors” section of your reports. Select “Benchmarking (Beta)” to view this report. Please note that it will take up to two weeks for the data to appear since it is being categorized and collected for your reports.

Here’s a link to the Google Benchmarking page. Add it to your arsenal of tools that help you “dominate the web.”

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