Two weeks ago, Google Analytics added a new feature that lets you compare your site’s traffic with average data for other similar sites. To make this feature possible, you need to enable data sharing with the benchmarking service. “Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form.” There’s also an option to enable data sharing with other Google services that will allow a better integration between Analytics, AdWords and other services.
Well, this past weekend I decided to have a look what the hype is about and enabled Benchmarking for this blog.
When data sharing is enable you can instantaneous go look at the comparison between your blog and a certain category.
By default it selects the category “All sites of similar size”, but you are able to select a category/sub categories of which you want your site to be measured against.
When you’ve selected your category you are now able to view a comparison to all sites within that category. At the moment I think it is abit hazy to what sites are really in these categories etc.
When the graphs show, it will show two lines, one which is the data for your site/blog and the other is for the category you’ve selected, the average.
As you can see the trends along the lines are almost the same, but obviously my site’s trafic is way lower that the other in “my category”.
Obviosly you can view different kind of statistics as you normally can, different views from different angles of your site traffic data.
I would actually have liked if the other sites were identifiable so to compare yourself truly to another site, but obviously that will have other major impacts.
general impression …. looks good ‘n fancy, and one can see the power for this but for me personally at the moment gives me no real value as ‘just a blog’ poster.
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