If you’re not familiar with the benchmarking stats that Google Analytics gives you or how to use it, here’s some information that you may find useful.
According to Google, benchmarking is described as…
“…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.”
Basically, the benchmarking service gives you some insight into how your website compares to other websites within your industry. Well, at least within the category of your industry.
Let’s take one website as an example, this website is one for a divorce attorney in Miami.
When I open the Benchmarking tab in his Google Analytics account I can compare his website to all websites of similar size OR to websites who are listed in Family Law and are similar to his size. I chose to be specific and get some benchmark data comparing my clients’ website to others in Family Law.
The results are as follows….
1) My client receives 11.44% more visitors than other family law websites of the same size.
Analysis: So, this stat is good. It means that the marketing I’m doing for him is working. He’s getting more visitors than other websites his size.
2) My clients’ website has 6.10% higher bounce rate than other websites in this comparison.
Analysis: This stat requires that I look a bit deeper into what pages are bouncing. See if I can find why there’s a bounce, is there supposed to be a bounce? And what can I do to fix it?
3) My clients’ website has 2.70% fewer page views. That means less people are moving around the site to other pages.
Analysis: Hmm – this tells me that I probably need to go in and create a “workflow” of how I want visitors to go through the site. Once I’ve decided the workflow, I then need to create some call to action buttons to give the visitors guides throughout the site.
4) My clients’ website has 14.61% higher average time on the site.
Analysis: This is good. This tells me that the information on the site is good. It’s what the visitors want.
5) My clients’ website has 12.69% fewer page/visits.
Analysis: The average visitor went to 2.23 pages on the website. This is lower than normal and it tells me again, that I probably need to add some more call to action buttons throughout the site. Or perhaps we need some more information about certain topics on the site. I would have to analyze which pages are not being viewed and see if it’s a navigation problem (maybe the visitors aren’t seeing these pages?)
6) My clients’ website has 1.33% fewer new visitors to the site.
Analysis: This is not good. My client is getting fewer new visitors to his site than his competition. The Internet marketing is not attracting new visitors and I now need to find out if the problem is keywords or the site itself.
So you see, the information provided from the benchmarking feature on Google Analytics is a great way to “see” what’s going on with the website. The next step then is to have the experience and expertise to dissect the information and create a plan to make any corrections needed. So, I guess it’s true, Internet marketing is a bit of science and bit of an art form!
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