Google Analytics Data Sharing

I know that this has long been covered elsewhere on the blogosphere, however it seems to have taken Google longer than the stated 2 weeks for them to gather benchmarking data for this website. Google Analytics data sharing is something that I have long been waiting for; the ability to compare your website metrics against others that are similar.

If you have the option checked in Google Analytics for Google to collect and share your analytics data it should take 2 weeks for benchmarking data to show within your other analytics data. It took more like 3-4 weeks for my benchmarking data to show, but I expect this could be due to the low amount of traffic I receive and broad target audience to compare to.

You can choose to compare the website against websites of a similar size or against websites within certain categories. The reports available through benchmarking are focussed around the visitor metrics; number of visits, bounce rate, pageviews, average time on site, pages per visit and new visits. Within all my reports except new visits my website is lower than the benchmark, something that I will try to address as the website develops.