Google Analytics Benchmarks
UPDATED: Fri Mar 28 16:34:35 EDT 2008
A bit ago Google Analytics quietly put in a new feature that you could opt into - their benchmarks. It was going to, in aggregate, show you some stats comparing your site’s performance to a jury of its peers. So, dutifully, I signed up but all I got was a coming soon screen… fortunately the waiting’s over and the benchmarking data is now live.
It’s pretty interesting info - it groups your site into a bucket with other sites of similar size. It isn’t specific on what it means by similar size, but from looking at the various sites I have under the program my guess is that it works by average page views. Most of the other metrics show wide differences but pageviews seems always to be pretty close. It also allows you to pick and choose categories that you want to compare to - by default it matches you against everything your size, but you can narrow that down by going into the category chooser and picking only sites about Computers & Electronics, as an example. Again, as Google’s MO is, it is not clear how sites get bucketed into those categories.
Still this thing is pretty nice - it compares your stats against the panel’s in a bunch of those topline metrics, like visits, bounce rate, pages/visit, avg time on site, % new visits and of course pageviews. I can definitely recommend signing up for it - it appears to me to be completely anonymous - quite a different approach than Quantcast takes, so your secrets are safe with the G. I mean, I wouldn’t mind a little less anonymity - if it would show samples in the category list of sites in the mix that would be great. Not to see specific site’s traffic but simply to see who’s stats are being thrown into that batch of numbers would be really interesting.
The numbers for this particular site I found interesting. I killed my peer group in visits - pretty much doubling the benchmark. Sadly, though, I lose out on the other things, notably pages per visit - by corollary - is about half (thus my pageviews remains just about even with the peer group). My bounce rate is also significantly higher than the benchmark’s. Sigh.
I interpret this to mean that my SEO activities are much more successful than my peers’, driving a lot more visitors to this ol’ blog. Unfortunately, I am doing a poor job of capitalizing on that traffic with people coming to a single page and leaving. I wish the benchmark category chooser had a category or several subcategories that grouped blogs together - I’d be curious to see if many blogs suffered from this or if mine is just bad at it. Still, it just reinforces some of the goals I laid out for myself in January.
Have you turned opted into the benchmark program? Just curious if you’re seeing the pageviews as the common denominator?
UPDATE: Heh, turns out if you RTFM that Google tells you that sites of similar size is under three size categories (small, medium and large) based on number of visits. Which is odd and strangely coincidental that my two of my sites that get a reasonable amount of traffic matche the pages viewed so closely and the visits so not closely. And those two sites have significantly different pages/visit. Hmm..
March 24th, 2008 at 11:15 am
I haven’t opted into benchmarks for any of my 900 sites (or maybe I did and forgot about it), but reading this makes me want to.
Less page views and more bounces could mean you’re doing a great job, if it means you’re putting what people want on the page they land on, and they don’t have to click a bunch of extra times to get there. (The opposite would be something like MySpace, where you have to click through 10 pages to get to what should have happened in one or two.)
March 24th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Jason, yeah, if the numbers are interesting I can’t think of a good reason not to sign up - as of now I don’t see the privacy/competitive concerns. I’d definitely be curious to see if your 900 sites also show the PV bucketing behaviour or if that was just coincidence for me. Man that’d be cool if G would let you switch bucketing metrics so you could say - of all the sites that have bouncerates like mine, what are the other stats. That’d be sweet.
And the interpretation you provide is a good one - consistent with searchers’ behaviours, but I’d like to make the site stickier, so that people come and say, that was a neat piece, what else is up in here? Let me subscribe to the RSS. And let me click on a few of these ads.