The abil­i­ty to under­stand, track, and define user behav­ior is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing con­sumers, and momen­tol­ogy. Increas­ing­ly, the pow­er of ana­lyt­ics empow­ers mar­keters to do this bet­ter. The return of Google Ana­lyt­ics’ Bench­mark­ing Reports enables brands to com­pare per­for­mance to com­peti­tors, and high­light oppor­tu­ni­ties for growth.

Google Ana­lyt­ics has announced the return of Bench­mark­ing reports. The fea­ture, which was dis­con­tin­ued in 2011, deprived mar­keters of a sim­ple way to con­tex­tu­al­ize per­for­mance with that of their rel­e­vant mar­ket.

In a blog post herald­ing the return of the fea­ture, Google explained that “bench­mark­ing lever­ages the foot­print of Google Ana­lyt­ics and can help you set mean­ing­ful tar­gets, spot trends occur­ring across indus­tries and answer a whole array of ques­tions: Which chan­nels should you be invest­ing more in? How does your mobile engage­ment com­pare to your peers? How unique is your audi­ence?”

In the revamped release, ana­lyt­ics users are able to com­pare their per­for­mance to com­peti­tors in their indus­try, choos­ing from “1600 indus­try cat­e­gories, 1250 mar­kets and 7 size buck­ets.”

Identifying Underutilized Channels, Marketing Opportunities

Google Ana­lyt­ics used the exam­ple of Twid­dy, a vaca­tion rentals com­pa­ny, which was able to use Bench­mark­ing reports to refo­cus and opti­mize mar­ket­ing resources.

“It was clear we were miss­ing a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty in email mar­ket­ing,” accord­ing to Twid­dy CMO Ross Twid­dy.

As seen in the image above, Twid­dy was well below the trav­el indus­try aver­age in the amount of ses­sions, and new ses­sions, attained via email mar­ket­ing. This was despite the fact that Twid­dy’s aver­age ses­sion dura­tion that they were obtain­ing from emails was almost dou­ble the indus­try aver­age, indi­cat­ing that users were find­ing the con­tent they were look­ing for on the Twid­dy web­site.

Twid­dy used Google Ana­lyt­ics to iden­ti­fy the fac­tors that was draw­ing clicks from con­sumers, name­ly price, loca­tion, and rental type, and were able to seri­ous­ly improve their email mar­ket­ing per­for­mance.

“We launched an email last week based on our find­ings, and it shat­tered our email mar­ket­ing records: a 48% aver­age open rate and a 40% click­through rate,” said Twid­dy.

Conclusion

New approach­es to ana­lyt­ics are giv­ing us ever improv­ing insights on con­sumer behav­ior and pur­chase jour­neys. The return of Google Ana­lyt­ics’ bench­mark­ing reports will help enable mar­keters to iden­ti­fy under­uti­lized chan­nels, which can then pro­pel inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing efforts and per­for­mance across mul­ti­ple chan­nels.

Are you pleased to see the return of Google Ana­lyt­ics’ Bench­mark­ing reports? Will this empow­er your mar­ket­ing efforts or are there oth­er solu­tions you know of to mea­sure or con­tex­tu­al­ize mar­ket per­for­mance?