Prateek Dayal

One of the hardest thing when doing a startup is to know how well you are doing in an absolute sense. You can look at your stats, your metrics (signups/day etc) but its generally hard to find how you are doing compared to other people in your industry vertical.

Google Analytics offers a benchmarking service that allows you to compare your analytics data, such as visits, time spent per visit, bounce rate etc to industry benchmark. You can chose your industry vertical and you are then compared against websites in your category and similar size. You cannot see benchmarking data for websites that are different size segment.

They build the benchmarking data with the help of anonymous data contribution. So you can enable data sharing in your account and contribute your data to the benchmarking service. The contribution is anonymous (all identifiable information is removed) and the data is typically mixed with hundreds of other website. In fact to be able to use the benchmarking service you have to contribute data to it.

So go ahead and enable the service for your website if you don’t mind sharing your traffic data and see how you are doing compared to others in the same space.

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benchmarking, data sharing, google analytics