The other day my Google Analytics account made an offer along the lines of “give us your data and we’ll give you industry benchmarks”. Of course, Google already has my data, but this takes it a step further, as my data would presumably become part of the data pool that produces the benchmarks. I can also opt in to share data with Google products and, in exchange, get access to future, unspecified new features.

I unceremoniously rejected this offer and will keep my data for myself, thank you very much. Its not so much that I buy into the whole Google is evil and eats babies myth. I just don’t see the value in benchmarking. Of course, benchmarks can work wonders with management: “we are here and the rest of the industry is way up/down there…” and that might be reason to peak at Google’s benchmarks. However, I don’t build websites for some industry, I build them with for specific customer segments and with specific marketing purposes in mind. The raison d’état for each site is so varied that any comparison with some aggregated and averaged number of visitors or time spent on site is totally meaningless. What value have I achieved if my site attracts twice the number of visitors or half the bounce rate of the industry average, but I have failed to meet my own marketing objectives? For that reason, I prefer to define KPIs on a site-specific basis, to track the trends over time, and to compare with external benchmarks only when absoluted needed (and, even then, with a huge grain of salt).

Thursday, April 10th, 2008 @ 2:34 am analytics
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