Editorial
The Gist
- Competitive insights unlocked. GA4’s benchmarking feature allows marketers to compare performance with industry peers, providing valuable competitive context.
- Enhanced marketing strategies. Benchmarking data helps marketers identify performance gaps and prioritize areas for improvement based on industry trends.
- Daily data updates. Benchmark data is refreshed every 24 hours, enabling marketers to track changes and make more informed decisions in real time.
With the sunsetting of Universal Analytics complete, Google can turn its development attention to features in the current analytics version, GA4.
Its latest GA4 feature is a long-awaited feature, benchmarking data for competitor analysts. The metrics let you compare your performance on key website or app metrics with industry peers, offering a critical competitive context within a given industry.
Google has previously offered benchmarking reporting in its earlier iterations of Google Analytics and had long promised to provide benchmark data for its GA4 account users. The decision to launch the feature is timely as marketers seek more reporting options to assess their strategic progress and quickly make adjustments to their decisions.
Table of Contents
The History of Benchmarking
Benchmarking metrics are a highly sought analysis, yet its existence in analytics dashboards has varied from inclusion to deletion. Google has some prior history with benchmark reporting to complement its analytics reporting. It featured benchmark reports in Google Analytics as an auxiliary report that allowed users to compare their website's performance against similar metrics based on aggregated data from other websites in similar industries.
Phasing Out and Reintroducing Benchmark Reports
However, Google phased out benchmark reports before users transitioned from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The benchmark reports were removed as Google adapted its measurements and reports to evolving data privacy regulations. Google needed to assure user expectations that the data collection for its analytics protects identity — that data associated with individual analytics users was anonymized to provide insights yet not identify a specific business.
Google later reintroduced benchmark reporting to its current GA4 platform. In doing so, however, Google made a few changes to setting up access to the benchmark information.
Accessing and Customizing Benchmark Data
Unlike the report in Universal Analytics, the metrics were not immediately visible to analysts. Instead of an integrated report among the menu selection, GA4 accounts were set up with no benchmarking data as a default setting. To gain access to benchmark data, analysts had to indicate permission for their data to be incorporated into the anonymized data.
Analysts must also indicate the size of the business so that the benchmark data makes a fair comparison. If you are a mom-and-pop business or a startup, you might not want to be unfairly compared to a large business in the same industry.
Finally, analysts must indicate an industry preference. The benchmark data can be categorized into 26 segments.
Once the permission is indicated, analysts can view the data. To view the data the “Modeling contributions & business insights” setting in the GA4 property must be enabled. It is located in the GA4 Admin panel, where analysts then select “Account Settings.”
Access to the benchmarking data is in the overview card, a panel on the home page that shows a trendline for each metric. The analyst selects a benchmarking category and then selects a desired metric. The metrics highlighted in the panel cover metrics calculated in Google Analytics for acquisition, engagement, retention and monetization.
Once selected, the user will see a display like the one below:
The Benchmark data panel offers the users a few core features. The panel displays a trendline for the account data as well as the median for the account’s peer group. The panel also shows the peer group range from the 25th to 75th percentile.
According to Google, the benchmarking data is encrypted in an aggregated format to maintain privacy. This is a similar treatment to the benchmark panel that Google Analytics had in its earlier iterations.
The groups in which the data is categorized are customizable, so you can adjust among the 26 category options if another group is a potential insight rather than the original choice during setup. The metrics and group choices combine to give you the best ways to find the most relevant comparison group.
Related Article: Google Universal Analytics Shutdown: What Marketers Need to Do Urgently
How Benchmark Analysis Informs Your Marketing Strategy
The enhanced benchmark data, in comparison to past efforts, offer more nuanced insights into organizing which analysis should be covered. With it, you can better pinpoint performance problems and more accurately estimate what improvements are possible.
Using Benchmark Data to Compare Performance
For example, let’s say you have a few OKRs involving sales growth for your business, and you want to know if your website activity is attracting a healthy number of new visitors. When examining the metrics, you want to see if any of your website visit trends are comparable to what the industry usually experiences. The benchmark trendlines can indicate if your activity is reflective of the industry — does the number of new visitors fit in the highest quartile of peer performance or does it lag?
What this information allows you to do is to order which metrics, and consequently which OKRs, to address so that you are making effective changes that have the best chance of seeing improved performance. Seeing a trend correlating with a segment median can imply that task for the metric are not as urgent as those of lower performance. Benchmark data is meant to be an indicator about industry segments that shows your business against industry trends.
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Regularly Refreshing and Applying Benchmark Data
Benchmark data is refreshed every 24 hours, so for an analysis workflow analysts should check the data for updates only on a daily basis.
Benchmark reports offer analysts the right competitive analysis to show how your online presence ranks against your industry peers. They set comparisons that guide your operations on the metrics that promise the most opportunity to improve. Using benchmark data like that in Google Analytics will help marketers drive the most effective decisions to stay ahead of the most prominent competitors.
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