What is Benchmarking in Google Analytics?

Ever look at your Google Analytics data and wonder, "Is this good?" An increasing session duration or a falling bounce rate feels like a win, but without context, you’re just guessing. That’s exactly what benchmarking is for. This article will show you what benchmarking is, how to use it, and how to understand its role in both Universal Analytics and GA4.

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What is Benchmarking in Google Analytics?

Put simply, benchmarking allows you to compare your website's performance data against industry averages. It answers the question, "How am I doing compared to everyone else?" The data comes from other companies in your industry who have also agreed to share their data anonymously with Google.

Think of it like checking your car’s miles-per-gallon (MPG). Knowing your car gets 30 MPG is useful, but knowing the average MPG for cars in its class is 25 MPG tells you that you're performing better than average. Conversely, if the average is 35 MPG, you know there’s room for improvement.

Google Analytics' benchmarking feature works the same way for your website metrics. It pools and anonymizes data from thousands of participants, allowing you to see if your key metrics are above, below, or on par with your industry's average performance. To do this, Google asks for three pieces of information to create relevant benchmarks:

• Industry Vertical: You choose the industry that best fits your business (e.g., Finance, Real Estate, E-commerce).
• Country/Region: This allows for location-based comparisons.
• Sessions: Google groups you with websites that get a similar amount of traffic. This prevents a small blog from being benchmarked against a multinational corporation.

With these filters, you get a much more relevant comparison than just looking at a global average across all websites.

How to Enable Benchmarking (for UA and GA4)

Here’s something important to understand right away: the easy-to-find, dedicated Benchmarking reports were a popular feature of the older Universal Analytics (UA). The newer Google Analytics 4 handles things differently. While GA4 doesn't have a direct "Benchmarking" report like UA, it does offer industry comparison data if you enable data sharing.

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Enabling Data Sharing for Benchmarking

The process of enabling the data sharing setting is similar for both versions of Analytics and is a prerequisite for seeing any competitive data.

You can enable it at the account level by doing the following:

1. Navigate to the Admin section of your Google Analytics account (the gear icon in the bottom-left).
2. In the Account column, click on Account Settings.
3. Find the Data Sharing Settings section and check the box for "Benchmarking."
4. Click Save.

By checking this box, you are contributing your site's anonymized data to the benchmarking pool and, in return, gaining access to the comparative data from your industry.

Accessing Benchmarking Reports in Universal Analytics (UA)

If you're still looking at historical data in a UA property, finding the benchmark reports is straightforward.

1. Go to your UA property.
2. In the left-hand navigation menu, expand the Audience report.
3. Click on Benchmarking.
4. You'll see reports for Channels, Location, and Devices.

From there, you can use the dropdown menus at the top to select your industry, country, and session size to get the most relevant comparison.

Finding Industry Comparison Data in Google Analytics 4

Since GA4 doesn’t have a specific "Benchmarking" section, the comparison data is more integrated into existing reports. After enabling data sharing, you'll start to see industry benchmarks pop up in various report cards, particularly on the Reports snapshot page.

GA4 primarily offers this comparison data within its Demographics details and Tech details reports (Reports > User > User attributes). These sections compare your audience's attributes (like age, gender, country, device) against the broader industry. It's a way to contextualize who your audience is, which can be just as valuable as comparing performance metrics.

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How to Interpret and Use Benchmarking Data

Let's look at how to get actionable insights from the classic benchmarking reports in Universal Analytics. While the interface is different in GA4, the thought process behind analyzing the data is the same.

After selecting your industry vertical and location in the report, you'll see a table showing data for these key metrics:

• Sessions: The total number of sessions.
• % New Sessions: The percentage of sessions that were from first-time users.
• New Sessions: The total number of first-time users.
• Pages/Session: The average number of pages viewed during a session.
• Avg. Session Duration: The average time a user spends on your site.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page sessions (where the user left without interacting).

For each metric, you'll see "Your Performance" next to the industry "Benchmark." A green upwards arrow next to a percentage indicates you're outperforming the benchmark, while a red downwards arrow shows underperformance.

Benchmarking by Channel

The Channels report is often the most insightful. It breaks down your performance across different traffic sources like Organic Search, Direct, Social, Email, and Referral.

Example Scenario: You're running an e-commerce store. In the Channels benchmarking report, you see the following:

• Organic Search: Your average session duration is +20% compared to the benchmark. This is great news! It suggests your SEO efforts are attracting an engaged audience that finds your content genuinely useful.
• Social: Your bounce rate is +45% higher than the benchmark (meaning 45% worse). This is a red flag. Your social media traffic is leaving almost immediately. This could mean your social posts are setting the wrong expectations, or the landing pages you're directing them to aren't engaging enough.

Actionable Insight: Based on this, you should double down on your SEO content strategy and conduct an audit of your social media campaigns. Are the links correct? Are the landing pages mobile-friendly and relevant to the posts?

Benchmarking by Location

This report compares your performance based on the user's geographic location. It's incredibly useful for identifying overlooked market opportunities.

Example Scenario: Your business is based in the United States and primarily targets U.S. customers. You check your Location report and notice:

• United States: Your metrics are about ~-5% below the benchmark. Not great, but not terrible.
• Australia: You see a Sessions count that is surprisingly high, and the engagement metrics (Pages/Session, Avg. Session Duration) are +50% above the local benchmark.

Actionable Insight: Even though you weren't actively targeting Australia, you're clearly resonating there. This data is a powerful signal to explore this region as a potential new market. You could consider running targeted ads in Australia or looking into more affordable shipping options for the region.

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Benchmarking by Device

This report breaks down performance by Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet. In today's mobile-first world, this is a can't-miss report.

Example Scenario: You recently launched a new website design. Your Device report shows:

• Desktop: Your engagement metrics are strong, performing well above the benchmark.
• Mobile: Your bounce rate is +60% higher than the industry benchmark, a significant underperformance. People are visiting your site on their phones and leaving immediately.

Actionable Insight: Your mobile user experience has a serious problem. The site might be slow to load on mobile, forms could be difficult to fill out, or the navigation might be clunky. This tells you to prioritize mobile UX/UI improvements immediately.

The Drawbacks of Benchmarking Data in Google Analytics

Benchmarking is a good sanity check, but it's not a silver bullet. You need to be aware of its limitations to avoid drawing the wrong conclusions.

• The Categories are Too Broad: The industry categories are very wide. A small SaaS startup in the "Computers and Electronics" category is being benchmarked against massive enterprises in the same field. What works for them might be completely irrelevant to you.
• A Question of Apple-to-Apples: The data doesn't account for context. Your competitor's "Paid Search" traffic might be 300% higher than yours, but that doesn't account for the fact they're spending millions on ads while you have a tiny budget. The benchmark tells you "what," but it never tells you "why."
• Potential for Small Sample Sizes: The benchmark data is only pulled from accounts that opt in. If you're in a niche industry or a smaller region, there might not be enough data to provide a meaningful benchmark.
• Different Business Goals: The benchmark can't account for specific business models or goals. A blog with an ads-based revenue model wants long session durations and many pages per session. An e-commerce site might want a quick checkout, leading to a shorter session duration. Judging yourself against a benchmark without considering this can be misleading.
• The GA4 Experience: The downgrade in direct, dedicated benchmarking reports in GA4 compared to Universal Analytics is a major drawback for many marketers. While industry comparisons are available, they aren't as focused, powerful, or easy to access as they once were.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics benchmarking is an excellent tool for gaining high-level context. It helps you zoom out from your own data and see how your website stacks up against the broader industry, pointing you toward potential strengths and weaknesses. However, remember to treat this data as a starting point for deeper questions, not as a definitive final verdict on your performance.

Getting a complete picture of your performance often means pulling data from multiple sources like Google Analytics, your various ad platforms, your e-commerce backend, and your CRM - a task that can still be incredibly time-consuming. We built Graphed because we believe getting these insights should be simple. Instead of cross-referencing industry standards, we make it easy to connect all your first-party data sources in one place. By asking simple questions in plain English, you can build real-time dashboards that show what’s driving growth for your business, letting you focus on answering specific questions about your campaigns and audiences, not just broad market trends.