Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports Return: Discover Areas To Grow Revenue

Google Ana­lyt­ics Bench­mark­ing reports reveal areas where you can increase vis­i­bil­i­ty and con­vert more cus­tomers.

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

The abil­i­ty to under­stand, track, and define user behav­ior is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing con­sumers, and momen­tol­ogy. Increas­ing­ly, the pow­er of ana­lyt­ics empow­ers mar­keters to do this bet­ter. The return of Google Ana­lyt­ics’ Bench­mark­ing Reports enables brands to com­pare per­for­mance to com­peti­tors, and high­light oppor­tu­ni­ties for growth.


Google Ana­lyt­ics has announced the return of Bench­mark­ing reports. The fea­ture, which was dis­con­tin­ued in 2011, deprived mar­keters of a sim­ple way to con­tex­tu­al­ize per­for­mance with that of their rel­e­vant mar­ket.

In a blog post herald­ing the return of the fea­ture, Google explained that “bench­mark­ing lever­ages the foot­print of Google Ana­lyt­ics and can help you set mean­ing­ful tar­gets, spot trends occur­ring across indus­tries and answer a whole array of ques­tions: Which chan­nels should you be invest­ing more in? How does your mobile engage­ment com­pare to your peers? How unique is your audi­ence?”

In the revamped release, ana­lyt­ics users are able to com­pare their per­for­mance to com­peti­tors in their indus­try, choos­ing from “1600 indus­try cat­e­gories, 1250 mar­kets and 7 size buck­ets.”

Identifying Underutilized Channels, Marketing Opportunities

Google Ana­lyt­ics used the exam­ple of Twid­dy, a vaca­tion rentals com­pa­ny, which was able to use Bench­mark­ing reports to refo­cus and opti­mize mar­ket­ing resources.

It was clear we were miss­ing a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty in email mar­ket­ing,” accord­ing to Twid­dy CMO Ross Twid­dy.

analytics_twiddy

As seen in the image above, Twid­dy was well below the trav­el indus­try aver­age in the amount of ses­sions, and new ses­sions, attained via email mar­ket­ing. This was despite the fact that Twid­dy’s aver­age ses­sion dura­tion that they were obtain­ing from emails was almost dou­ble the indus­try aver­age, indi­cat­ing that users were find­ing the con­tent they were look­ing for on the Twid­dy web­site.

Twid­dy used Google Ana­lyt­ics to iden­ti­fy the fac­tors that was draw­ing clicks from con­sumers, name­ly price, loca­tion, and rental type, and were able to seri­ous­ly improve their email mar­ket­ing per­for­mance.

We launched an email last week based on our find­ings, and it shat­tered our email mar­ket­ing records: a 48% aver­age open rate and a 40% click­through rate,” said Twid­dy.

Conclusion

New approach­es to ana­lyt­ics are giv­ing us ever improv­ing insights on con­sumer behav­ior and pur­chase jour­neys. The return of Google Ana­lyt­ics’ bench­mark­ing reports will help enable mar­keters to iden­ti­fy under­uti­lized chan­nels, which can then pro­pel inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing efforts and per­for­mance across mul­ti­ple chan­nels.


Are you pleased to see the return of Google Ana­lyt­ics’ Bench­mark­ing reports? Will this empow­er your mar­ket­ing efforts or are there oth­er solu­tions you know of to mea­sure or con­tex­tu­al­ize mar­ket per­for­mance?

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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