Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports

Google has released a new benchmarking feature that will allow businesses to further analyse their metrics against competition. This feature, while not globally available yet, has been reported to be added into to select GA4 properties. In this blog, BFJ Digital will outline what a benchmarking report is, what one can provide businesses, and how it can be used to make data-driven decisions for your business.

 

What Are Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports?

With each Google Analytics property selecting an industry in the set-up stage, Google will now provide industry insights into how your business is performing against competitors. This provides key business insights within your Google Analytics account that you can utilise to draw valuable insights from. Google Analytics creates these groups and industries based on your website traffic, industry vertical, and other business attributes.

Benchmarking Features Include

Want to know where your business sits in your industry? Google Analytics 4 benchmarking reports can tell you exactly this with their Industry Peer Comparisons feature. This feature provides you with all the data surrounding industry benchmarks to analyse where your business is outperforming the industry and where some refinement is needed. From there, you can draw actionable insights from these industry trends that will enhance your decision-making within your marketing strategies. The reports will enable businesses to measure benchmarking data metrics within acquisition, engagement, retention, monetisation, and key metrics that lie within these categories.

Another key feature of Google Analytics benchmarking is the frequency at which they are updated. These reports will refresh every 24 hours ensuring your decisions aren’t based on old, inaccurate data. This is also paired with strict privacy policies that will encrypt your data and anonymously contribute to the aggregate data within your industry.

What Do Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports Provide?

Within Google Analytics, you’ll soon be able to compare valuable metrics across all categories. Particularly, E-Commerce metrics will have industry standards where you can see similar sites and visualise how your sales are performing compared to others in your peer group. With your benchmarking report, a key understanding you’ll gain is whether your metrics are low-performing or whether there are macroeconomic factors at play affecting the industry as a whole.

Benchmarking Use Cases

By utilising benchmarking reports, businesses will view which percentiles they sit in. This can be used to determine which marketing strategies are needed to achieve your goals. An example of this may be your new users metric. If your business is on the lower end of attracting new users to the site, this would tell you an outreach strategy should be implemented to get new business in the door.

Another way for benchmarking reports to offer businesses insights is the Average Revenue Per User metric. This metric, when compared among your peer group, can be used to determine whether your website is optimised for upselling. If you find it isn’t, there is data to back your recommendation to run an upselling project to help optimise your site and maximise revenue.

Businesses will also be able to determine whether their websites are retaining users through engagement and traffic metrics. If your user behaviour is revealed to be strong with high intent, consider optimising your digital marketing strategies for conversions and ensure your website ticks conversion rate optimisation boxes.

With these capabilities coming to Google Analytics 4, marketing specialists will have adequate data to support their decision-making when recommending new strategies, or goal adjustments.

 

How We Will Utilise Benchmarking Data in Google Analytics

At BFJ Digital, data is at the core of all of our decision-making and strategies. These reports provided by Google Analytics 4 will allow us to be certain in our recommendations on digital strategies for our clients. Benchmarking data will change the way businesses approach their day-to-day optimisations, and if utilised correctly, will result in accurate strategies as issues within the business will be highlighted. Google Analytics 4 is already providing strong insights into how you can achieve your business goals, benchmarking is going a level deeper.