Google Analytics is something that I use on every site of mine. A few of them employ other analytics beyond that, but they all use Google Analytics for a baseline.
Today, Analytics is adding “industry benchmarking” to their site. If you choose to opt-in, this will do two things:
- Share your site statistics with other sites (anonymized, of course).
- Allow you to compare your data with other sites in your industry.
Why should you care? It makes it easier to determine whether your stats are up/down because of an industry-wide trend of if it’s something unique to you.
For example, suppose your traffic yesterday was much lower than normal. You could open analytics and then see that all of the traffic in your industry was lower. From there, you could figure out why (holiday, etc) and not stress out about it so much. 🙂
This feature will require you to opt-in — it won’t be enabled automatically (which is a good thing, privacy-wise). I’m still not seeing this option available in my Analytics, so please post in the comments when you see it in yours.
[…] two weeks ago, Google added an option to include your Analytics data into their beta benchmarking program. Today, that data is now available for use for those that opted […]