I have been waiting for this day and it has finally come.  This morning I got an email from Google Analytics describing their new benchmarking service:

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

Although the announcement is quite low-key, the possibilities are profound. Firstly, it paves the way for Google to create a global web traffic ranking system based on any number of criteria ranging from page impressions, unique visitors, time on site, bounce rate or a combination of all of them. Secondly, it might mean that an API could appear that would enable aggregators like Amatomu to access the relevant statistics which we currently have to gather ourselves. The reason I think this might happen is because there are effectively 4 ways you can choose to share your Google Analytics data:

1. Not at all
2. Only with other Google services
3. With other Google services and anonymously – this is for industry verticals OR
4. Share data without the restrictions of the previous 2 points and, by implication, enable 3rd party access

This final point may be a misinterpretation of the wording but I doubt it and I think a massive centralised system that uses permission-based access to enable site comparisons based on identical criteria is something that is highly necessary.  The pseudo-authority of panel-based systems like Alexa and Compete.com irritate me on a daily basis.  Naturally some site owners would like to keep their performance secret, but take the example of South African publishers:  the Online Publishers Association publishes their members’ page impressions and unique reader figures on a quarterly basis by month.  There is a sense that among the top publishers in the country these analytics are not worth keep a secret and what it means is that we can all compete directly based on real numbers and a single and consistent counting mechanism.

Once benchmarking is enabled, you can immediately see comparisons based on other similar sites for the following metrics:

• Visits
• Bounce Rate
• Page Views
• Avg Time on Site
• Pages/Visit
• Time on Site

This immediately means I can compare, in relation to advertising conversaion and performance, why a site I am tracking might be under-performing and so on, and most of this relates to the bounce rate.  The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits.  A high bounce rate is generally caused by either search traffic on individual articles or having once big site referring traffic  – in both cases the page the user ends up may be interesting to them but the rest of the site isn’t, or is not presented in a way that makes subsequent navigation easy.  If the bounce rate is high then the avg time on site is low and so is the pages/visit. So one can see the value of being able to compare your site to other similar ones to see where your winning or losing.

It will probably be another year before Google feel comfortable offering a 3rd party API for this data but the possibilities are profound and I hope they do it.