Google Analytics Introduces Benchmarking
Due to popular demand, Google is introducing a new benchmarking component to Google Analytics that will help businesses compare their site’s metrics with that of other sites.
How will the other sites agree to share their data? They will opt-in to the benchmarking and Google will aggregate the data without revealing individual data to competitors. They will throw the data into basic industry verticals and then anonymize and aggregate the data.
This will help sites determine if trends in their data are industry-wide. As Google puts in in their blog post about the change, “For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.”
Google is also adding a data-sharing option to Analytics where you actually decide whether or not you want to share data that can be accessed by others in the benchmarking app. You can also share your data with other Google services, and opting in to data sharing will open up other new features that are being integrated with Analytics. One of these features is the Conversion Optimizer that is currently part of AdWords.
It sounds like Google is incentivizing data sharing by providing other features, so if even if you’re confident in your site and don’t want to expose any data to competitors, there are other reasons to share your data.
Thanks to Manoj Jasra’s blog Web Analytics World for the info.
Technorati Tags: adwords, benchmarking, conversion optimizer, data sharing, google analytics
