Internet Marketing: Google Benchmarking Tool
How the Google benchmarking tool will help your SEO
Internet marketing is great for getting your website to perform in the search engines but once it is there and you are having a steady number of enquiries, wouldn’t it be much better if you could really asses how well your business was doing in comparison to others in the same industry?
That is where the Goolgle Analytics Benchmarking tool comes in useful. Google Analytics is very helpful and informs you of many aspects of your sites performance, which are really useful when you compare them from month to month, to see if your site is improving. By opting into being included in the benchmarking analytics, you can also gain further insight into how good or bad your website is doing.
You may feel that your site isn’t getting many enquiries? Is it your site though or is it the market conditions and economic climate affecting your industry? Without comparing to other sites in the industry, you could wrongly come to a conclusion that a lack of conversions is due to your site not being good enough when in fact the problem is due to the market for your industry being slow. An essential aspect to investigate before making drastic changes!
You need to go into your Goolge Analytics account and register your site to opt in to the benchmarking. Go to the edit account section and data sharing. Follow this by going to the benchmarking report in the visitors section and accept for sharing. When you go into your reports you can then pick the most appropriate category for you site to be compared to.
It usually take approx 2 weeks for Google to collate and compare your data to that of the rest of their benchmarking sites and start filtering results to your page. You will remain anonymous and no one will be able to identify your companies specific data.
When the results show, they will present under the visitors tab then under benchmarking. The results are displayed in 6 sections- Visits, Page views, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time on site and new visits.
Graphs will be displayed each with a grey line across showing the industry benchmark of what is the average value for this variable, for the industry you selected. A second line will be on each graph in blue which displays your site statistics. Now you can compare your stats to that of the benchmark to see how well your site is performing in each variable.
You need to use the data you find in the right way to help your website. This is a more accurate and realistic way of assessing what actions you need to take to improve the performance and the conversions that result from your website.You may see that you have less page views than the average for your industry and if this is the case then it gives you a starting block on what aspects of your google analytics account you need to look into further.
This example would lead you to look deeper into your page views so you can identify the most common exit pages which may need some updating. All aspects of your investigations into web analytics need to enable you to produce actions to improve your site, else they are just usless figures.
Although your main targets for your site will be to increase visitors, its always good when planning your internet campaigns to check your benchmarks so you can see what aspects need more attention than others.
Getting visitors to click on your site, although important, isn’t where it ends as if compared to your next competitor in the search engine your site gives a not so impressive user experience then, will you get the conversion? This ultimately is what SEO is really about …that’s what you do it for so don’t loose sight of what’s important.
Traditional marketing keeps a close eye on the other competitors within the industry to set guidelines on which success or failure can be measured against. Benchmarking with Google Analytics does this for all SEO and Internet marketing campaigns.
July 6th, 2010
This is a very good article as per a Webmaster is concerned. The article provides a better understanding on Google Analytics data and its proper utilization. This is very much useful in analyzing the websites performance in search engines. Benchmark tool is often ignored by many or they will not be having proper knowledge on it. So, its a good work done.
July 7th, 2010
Thanks for explaining the Google Benchmarking tool.
This will be my next planning.
I can say it from my personal experience that a proper business plan is very important for your internet success, it is the same fundamental for any business. and you can be successful in internet marketing only if you are treating it as your business and working in a planned manner.
July 12th, 2010
i quite interested with what you both are discussing..
thanks for the post..