Google Analytics’ Web Statistics Benchmarking Service

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Last summer I looked at the different web statistics available for benchmarking the competition. From a marketing point of view, the result wasn’t very good. Poor methodology and a lack of transparency mean that most publicly available web statistics are worse than useless: by providing a false sense of confidence, they can lead to bad business decisions.

It is thus with much interest that I note the announcement of a new web marketing benchmarking comparison service from Google.

Integrated into Google Analytics, this functionality will be limited in scope:

• Sites must use Google Analytics and enable their participation in the program.
  • Competitors such as Fireclick’s web analytics benchmark index make some data publicly available without having to use the tracking tool. I can already think of the work-arounds some companies will find to this issue.
  • Companies must also share their data with other Google products. There is an option to share data with just Google products but not to exclude Google products. This seems to be a commercial limitation, which is rather unfortunate. For now, Google products means AdWords.
  • The sharing cannot be enabled at a site level – it is enabled at a profile level (user) which will often include multiple sites.
• Other sites (in comparison industries) must do the same.

Once data sharing has been enabled at the profile level, data collection should begin – actually Google’s Benchmarking FAQ says data will be retroactively available for the prior month.

It appears that Google is categorizing sites algorithmically, i.e. as they already tend to do with organic search and AdSense ad placement on third party sites. It would be interesting to see if support for manually assigning industry categories, e.g. NAICS – North American Industry Classification System, to a site will be added.

Benchmarking functionality is not yet available, although data sharing can be enabled.

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