Back on March 16, 2011, Google stopped providing its standard Analytics benchmarking thorough its Google Analytics reports; on Friday July 1st however; Google decided to provide this benchmarking data back to its users through a monthly newsletter.
If you have opted-in anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics, the newsletter is likely in your e-mailbox by now.
What is Google Analytics Benchmarking?
Google Benchmarking is a statistical analysis report comparing the data gathered from hundreds of thousands of sites opted-in anonymous data sharing with the same data gathered a year ago during the same monthly period. The historical data is considered the baseline or the benchmark for sites performance on the different captured metrics.
Here is what July 1st, 2011 newsletters have as far as site performances. [SOURCE: Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter. 2011, Volume 1, July 2011]
Site Metrics
Compared to a year ago, websites have seen reduced pages / visit, average time on site, as well as bounce rate.
- 1- Breakdown by Geography
Our anonymous database has aggregated geographic breakdown at the country level. Here are a few representative countries and their respective aggregate metrics. The first number in each cell represents the metric for the date range 11/1/10-2/1/11. The parenthesized number is the Year over Year delta compared to a year ago.
For bounce rate, the distribution by country is plotted below:
The distribution above is annotated with some countries — which seem to indicate a story of leisure and stage of economic development. For a related metric: average time on site, the distribution by country is plotted below:
The type of countries annotated in the average time on site graph above seem to be in reverse order as those in the bounce rate distribution.
- 2- Breakdown by Traffic Sources
Traffic sources below are identified by how the “source” and “medium” parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.
- 3- Conversion Rate Distribution
Many marketers’ favorite metric is conversion rate. Here is the worldwide distribution of Google Analytics “goal conversion rate” by country.
Would anyone have guessed that states which are known for conversions are also high for their citizens’ goal conversion rate? Note that for some states with few population, the statistical significance of the conversion metric comes into doubt.
Traffic Sources
Traffic sources below are identified by how the “source” and “medium” parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.
Operating Systems
Browsers and Operation Systems (OS) are identified by the “referrer” string sent by users’ browsers.
