G Analytics Benchmarking

[ambellina]

This morning I checked this new "Benchmarking" tab and found some comparative graphs. According to G, my site is stomping on all other "sites of similar size." I'm disappointed in the category list. My area is a bit hard to fit into any of the sections. I doubt I'll be using this feature much, since for all I know there could be only one other site providing info. I'm fairly certain that none of my direct competitors use GA, and they're what I want to compare to anyway.

Anyone see anything surprising or useful in their benchmarking data?

[cgrantski]

My surprise was that Google's version of "sites of similar size" was nonsense. You can see the comparability of size in a couple of the stats.

I assume it will get better as more companies opt in.

Luckily our sites fit perfectly into categories.

[mblyman]

Just took a look at it as well today.

There wasn't a good fit for our product line in the category but we found one that was close.

As was mentioned we look significantly bigger then the benchmark as much as ten times bigger (and we are small) so I'm not sure what that means...

Are we at the top of the small group?

It would appear that way. I think once they have more data they can shrink the group size down and it will be more useful

[cw360]

I think that I will be using it. Its a good gauge of the market. However, I think that we are between size segments and we could fit into a couple different categories. Hopefully, this is a great start from Google and hopefully it will get better over time.

[whoisgregg]

Anyone know how to figure out what category Google has lumped your site into?

I know how to change what sites I compare my site against, but I don't see the big thing that says "btw, you are in the blah > blah category."

[Miamacs]

I checked it today and it was a huge disappointment.

...

I like Analytics and all but:

Travel.
There are no destinations at all.

Ok, let's see regional.
For example the only SE-EU country is Greece.
The only SE Asian country is India.

what the...?!

...

The account I tried it with ( for you HAVE to share your data and even if you opt out, it STAYS there! ) only has some hobby and smaller local sites. All of them do great and all of them would fit in very broad categories e.g. ( making it up, but along these lines ) Country name, Kind of retail ( it's not there even though it's a major industry ), same theme but informative ( would have fit under lifestyle or ABOVE apparel but it wasn't there )

The categories remind me of the AdWords categories.
Oh wait... nope, these ARE the AdWords categories.
As lacking and unbalanced as ever.

Sample sizes...

You know when you actually SEE that there's only ONE single site in that category, it makes you want to laugh/cry. I mean we're talking about Google... what's going on? The benchmark data was sometimes even FLAT.

...

Yeah well whatever.
It's a great idea, but I guess people just aren't getting motivated to opt in.

Either that, or that Google had forgotten to categorize / allow users to categorize sites, and are using that utterly flawed automatic theme/category selection system their AdWords / AdSense programs that they have sooo much success in maintaining.

compared to sites of similar size?! size?! size in what exactly?! bytes? pages? characters? pixels? server box? eyelashes?

[edited by: Miamacs at 1:14 pm (utc) on April 1, 2008]

[zangatling]

It also says that as more users opt-in to the system, they will increase the number of categories. I'm hopeful these categories will become more specific as time goes by.

<snip>

[edited by: engine at 2:11 pm (utc) on April 4, 2008]
[edit reason] No sigs, thanks [/edit]