Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/benchmarking-for-website-performance-on-search-engines.html

Dealing with questions like what is a “good” bounce rate for a web page, what is the “average” number of visits, how much traffic from different sources is “normal” is not easy until you compare your website performance with others.Now, Google is making things much easy by bringing a new type of report into its analytics – the benchmarking report.

What is a benchmarking report?

This is not a completely new tool in Google Analytics. In 2011 Google closed this report and left marketers to rely on their knowledge and intuition when assessing the average market situation. Now the benchmarking report has returned! Users can get an overview of channels, location and devices for 1600 areas and 1250 different markets.

Why is Benchmarking Important?

The benchmarking report compares the company’s web site with the average on the market. This gives quite a reliable understanding of what is the competitiveness of the company’s web site.This means that companies have sufficient data for setting realistic goals and assessing performance. For example, if you know that the bounce rate of the average web site in your field or area is 40% and your rate is better than that, there is no point in focusing on reducing bounce rate. Better to put your focus somewhere else where it is more crucial. So, the benchmarking report shows what are the strengths of the company and what could be improved.

How to use it?

You can find the benchmarking report under the Audience tab. This can only be seen by users who have configured the Universal Analytics and who share their data with Google. You can configure this setting at Admin -> Account Settings and by putting a tick next to the “Anonymously with Google and others“ box.

The report can be seen in 3 variations:

Channels – compares the sources of your web site visits with your competitors’ visits.
Location – shows what countries are your competitors’ visits coming from. Important for exporting companies.
Devices – compares your web site’s operation and activity on different devices compared to your competitors.

Before diving into to the data, check if your settings are correct. Google has automatically categorized your company into a field which describes your company the best. Select the market and the average daily number of visits. If you would like to receive information about the local market, you need to take into account that the more specific you become, the less comparable data is available and it is possible that the report will not give you an adequate match.

How to interpret the report?

The channels report that shows where the visits for your web site and for your competitors’ web sites are coming from will probably be the most important tool in this regard. From this you are able to conclude which channels are your competitors mostly investing in and where you still have some room for development. The report itself is colorful and reminds us of the heatmap, meaning that positive and negative trends have been marked accordingly which gives the user a quick overview of the company’s position.

Channels report

Channel report will give insights into where competitor traffic is coming from. The report will give some insights into the impact of social media visits and the people who have come to the web site via direct traffic. The report will indicate which strategy in these channels should be reviewed and modified accordingly,

Location report

The location report is useful to exporting companies mostly. In this report you can see the data for only the selected location. This is useful only when you select “all regions” from the settings. Then you are able to compare how well your web site is operating in different markets and it is possible that you will find potential new target countries, where the consumer behavior promotes export.

The Devices Report

The devices report is currently especially beneficial as the relevance of mobile devices is growing rapidly. The devices report will tell you if there are significantly more visits with mobile devices than the market average or not.

Conclusion

The benchmarking report is a great tool for marketing both in setting realistic goals and in working to achieve them. With the help of the report, online marketers are able to identify the strengths of the company online and find new opportunities of development. We also will like to note that there has to be some care in using the report because it could also be misleading because especially because of the complexity of dealing with information for different areas on a local level. Our recommendation would be to take it as a useful tool for making general conclusions about the performance of your web site.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/benchmarking-for-website-performance-on-search-engines.html

Great tips. Thanks for sharing