Article by Mike Arnold, Rapid Repair

Observant webmasters were in a bit of an uproar earlier this year when the Google sent a letter quietly informing them that their website benchmarking tool were leaving the realm of Google Analytics and would be replaced by a vaguely described quarterly benchmarking newsletter.  Fast forward through 4 months of benchmarking darkness and Google has released the first quarterly newsletter to subscribed site admins via email at ~8:30pm EST on the Friday preceding the 4th of July weekend, (a treatment usually reserved for a bad earnings report).  So the question is, “has Google taken website benchmarking and made it better?”

The industry benchmarking tools in GA had their flaws (including questions over whether enough data existed to make the results valid for any particular website’s industry,) but the tools were free (to any site who agreed to anonymously share their own data with Google). However, taken with a grain of salt, they were better than having no idea of how your website stacked up to its peers.  Now looking at what’s changed, we can see how Google has decided to reward “hundreds of thousands” of sites for anonymously sharing dozens of measureable aspects of site usage with Google.

Unlike the Google Analytics reports which a webmaster could run on demand to compare their site to its peers on a variety of key metrics, Google has published a single report, containing a just a few stats, summarily describing either the world in total or if you’re lucky; your whole country.  The benchmarking newsletter also substitutes your date range of choice with Google data which was 5 – 8 months old at time of press.

Interesting bits from the report includes:

• Decreases in the number of pages viewed per site visit (vs. one year earlier) and average time spent on the site, but a lower bounce rate (i.e. less people left after just one page.)
• Minor changes in how users are finding their destinations with search engines guiding about 1% of traffic previously directed by website link referrals.
• Goal conversion rates (percent of visitors who complete the goal set by the site.) Most of the world fell between 0.7% – 1.6%.
  

  11/1/10 – 2/1/11
  Direct	36.80%
  Referral	19.40%
  Search Engines	28.00%
  Other	15.80%

So does the new quarterly benchmarking report leave site admins and developers feeling like Google still knows how to share and share alike?  Well, the new report is fewer metrics, less current, is completely generalized so that it does not apply to individual sites/industries and is only available once every 3 months.  In short, Google is getting just as much as Google currency (data) as it did before, but seems to be reserving the information capital for itself.  Without some big changes it’s hard to see this report escaping from its holiday weekend, Friday night release schedule.

You can view the full Google Quarterly Benchmarking Report courtesy of Rapid Repair Here.