Re: What does the Benchmark in GA mean?
This feature allows you to compare your websites data with other sites related to your niche or industry and with a similar visitor number.
Google says:
Quote:
Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. 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.
The google benchmark is based on a minimum of 100 related websites, but usually this is more like hundreds of thousands for most common niches.
It is thus a good way to see how your doing, in particular for trends...
Sudden spikes in search volume for a certain niche, maybe due to an important news story or event, will show up in those benchmarks. You can now see if you have participated in this spike or are actually falling behind the competition. Comparing benchmark visitor numbers to your own site visitor numbers may be a bit arbitrary, because there are several benchmark pools, related to a certain visitor number. YOu might just fall inbetween a certain pool, so comparison has no use.
Hope this helped
