New Google Analytics Feature - Site Benchmarking

I’ve just read an interesting post from Search Engine Land, announcing the introduction of benchmarking data within Google Analytics. This essentially means that you’ll be able to compare your own stats (UB’s, page impressions, time on site etc.) with aggregate data for your industry. The catch is that you need to opt in to “share” your data, this purely means that Google will anonomize and aggregate your data with sites in the same industry and of similar size. So you’re not actually giving away individual data about your site, which would be most peoples main concern. There’s no mention of regionalisation yet, but I’m sure it will be a feature Google is considering once the service comes out of beta.

This is a great step forward for Google Analytics and will allow site owners to put a “stake in the sand”, where as previously Hitwise data, which tends to be fairly costly, was the only option.

All the info from the horses mouth here

Is this a service you will use?

Do you have any concerns about Google having too much infomation about your site?

Update:

So the data has just been added to this feature. Looks pretty good in terms of presentation, however I have a few doubts on the types of people that are sharing their data. The 3 sites I had enabled the feature for, are all showing significantly more traffic, time on site etc. than the benchmark. I think at this stage, the early adopters are probably one man band ecommerce sites that don’t do huge amounts of traffic. It will be interesting to see if the benchmark improves as more people start to share their data, I’ll keep you posted.

Another Update:

Hmm, the data is still looking a bit shaky, but a bit better than last time I updated this post. There are still large discrepancies between one of the sites I’m trialling this on and the industry benchmarks.

A few examples for you:

Visits: 16,887 - Benchmark: 2,342 (+621.05%)

Page Views: 113,709 - Benchmark: 8,860 (+1,183.40%)

Pages/Visit 6.73 - Benchmark: 3.78 (+77.99%)

I know the site above is doing quite well, but not as well as Google would have me believe…

Within benchmarking you can select which industry your site is in, ranging from very broad to quite precise. In the above examples, I’ve been able to select the exact industry the site is in. Also, as previously mentioned, no mention of country data which is a bit of let down.