Understanding Your Website's Performance with Google Analytics 4 Benchmarking
Clients often ask, "How does my website compare to my competitors?" Getting reliable data for such comparisons has been challenging—until now. Google Analytics has reintroduced Benchmarking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), giving you access to industry-specific metrics for more informed performance insights.
Benchmarking enables you to compare your website's metrics against other businesses within your industry classification. Google constructs peer groups based on the industry category assigned to your GA4 property during setup, along with signals like your site’s URL.
To be eligible for benchmarking, make sure the Modeling contributions & business insights feature is enabled in your GA4 account under Account settings. Google uses encrypted, aggregated data to protect your privacy, ensuring your information is included only if minimum thresholds for data quality and volume are met.
Once activated, benchmarking data appears in GA4’s Home screen overview card, as shown in the example screenshots below from the Google Merchandising Store demo account.
Click on the badge on the top right of the overview card to turn on benchmarking data.
The solid blue line shows your site’s performance, while the dotted blue line and shaded area represent your peer group’s median and performance range, respectively. Hovering over the trendline provides detailed metrics.
What Metrics Can You Compare?
Benchmarking covers acquisition, engagement, retention, and monetization metrics. By default, peer groups align with your industry category but can be changed through the dropdown list, allowing access to additional categories and subcategories.
From the screenshot above we see that views per session for the Google Merchandise Store tend to outperform the shopping portal media overall during the last 7 days date range, as well as outperforming the peer group range for 4 days.
Google offers sample scenarios for benchmark performance in acquisition, engagement, and retention:
Acquisition: New User Rate
- Peer Group: Shopping > Apparel
- Scenario: Your 'New User Rate' is consistently below the 25th percentile of your peer group.
- Insight: This suggests that, relative to similar apparel businesses, you're acquiring new users at a lower rate.
- Potential Action: Consider increasing your investment in user acquisition strategies, such as targeted advertising, social media campaigns, or content marketing.
Engagement: Average Engagement Time per Session
- Peer Group: Arts & Entertainment
- Scenario: Your 'Average Engagement Time per Session' is significantly higher than the 75th percentile of your peer group.
- Insight: This indicates that users are spending more time interacting with your content compared to most of your peers.
- Potential Action: Capitalize on this high engagement by introducing strategies to increase conversions, such as strategically placed calls-to-action or personalized recommendations.
Retention: Bounce Rate
- Peer Group: Travel & Transportation
- Scenario: Your 'Bounce Rate' is notably higher than the median of your peer group.
- Insight: This suggests that a larger proportion of users are leaving your site after viewing only one page, compared to similar businesses in the travel industry.
- Potential Action: Investigate the reasons for this high bounce rate. Consider improving your site's user experience, ensuring relevant content is easily accessible, or optimizing your landing pages.
GA4’s benchmarking revives valuable insights previously available in Universal Analytics, enabling you to better understand your performance within your industry. Need assistance with setup or analysis? Contact Primacy for expert guidance.
Stats class refresher:
The 75th percentile is a statistical measure that indicates the value below which 75% of the data falls. In other words, if your score is at the 75th percentile, it means that 75% of the scores are lower than yours. This is also known as the third or upper quartile.