Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports vs Industry Analysis on Similarweb Platform

As a Google Analytics fan, I was super excited to hear about one of their most recent releases – Benchmarking reports. This new feature holds tremendous opportunities in terms of understanding your market and where you stand within it. What makes this feature even more intriguing to me is its similarity to the ‘Industry Analysis’ feature in Similarweb platform. In order to understand the full potential of this new benchmarking tool and the differences between this tool and our own Industry Analysis, I’ll go over the two and compare their features and the potential insights they can provide.

All About Google Analytics Benchmarking Report

You’ll find the tool under ‘Audience > Benchmarking’ in your Google Analytics account. You can view the stats by 3 different dimensions – channel, location, and devices, and for 2 different segments – Acquisition and Behavior.

The stats are drawn from the entire industry, based on Google Analytics users that were willing to enable benchmarking with Google and others from their account settings page:

In fact, you can access the Benchmarking report tool only if you’ve checked that box. If you didn’t, you’ll see this message:

Google reveals the sample size that each report is based on:

*Stats for the Internet and telecom industry for all countries – by Google Analytics Benchmark report

The data is available for specific categories on a global view as well as for specific countries:

Let’s dive deeper into the different metrics you’ll find in this tool.

Benchmarking By Channel, Location, and Device

These metrics show you the breakdown by the different traffic channels – referral, social, organic search, etc. For each of these, you can see where your site stands compared to the entire industry for the following metrics: sessions, new sessions, new users, page per session, session duration, and bounce rate.

These metrics are also available with a country breakdown and devices (desktop, tablet, and mobile)

Possible Insights You Can Gain From Google Analytics’ Benchmarking Report Tool

• Get the broader picture of an industry
• See the growth potential for the industry and market
• Get an idea about the existing competition
• Estimate the difficulty of expanding in that industry and market

Seeing the bigger picture is always an advantage, but wouldn’t it be amazing if you could also see exactly who is competing with you as well as being able to dive into each of their analytics? This is where Industry Analysis in Similarweb comes in.

Benchmarking with Similarweb

Industry Analysis was launched over 6 months ago and you’ll find many similar features to what you’ve just seen on Google Analytics’ Benchmarking tool. However, there are some unique features that you won’t see on GA or any other platform for that matter. Let’s get a closer look at the different dimensions and metrics on the Industry Analysis tool in the Similarweb Platform:

Benchmarking by Channel and Location:

With Industry Analysis you get the total desktop visits, time on site, pages per visit, and bounce rate of an entire industry based on a sample of sites:

You can also see the traffic distribution per traffic source:

In the Geography section, you’ll find a breakdown by country for that industry. So, for instance, you can see from which country most of the traffic comes to the Internet & Telecom industry:

Breakdown per Traffic Source:

Now, this next part is what makes Industry Analysis so unique and what differentiates it from GA’s Benchmarking report tool – for each industry, you’ll find the full list of top referring domains:

Referring keywords:

And referring social networks:

Another unique feature exclusive to Similarweb is that it can show you which sites have AdSense on them. Sorting the list by the AdSense column will give you those sites you should add to your PPC, GDN, and search network campaigns. You can also click on any of these sites and get the complete website analysis for it, including: its own referring keywords, domains, etc., ad networks it uses, engagement metrics, and so on.

Now as much as I love Google Analytics (and I truly do), let’s face it – getting an actual view of the main players for an industry beats getting a view on the overall stat of that industry. But the differences don’t stop there, we have one more unique feature in Industry Analysis – industry leaders per traffic channel. For instance, here you see the top sites in the retail industry that get the most search traffic worldwide:

This data is available for all traffic sources – direct, organic/paid search, display advertising, referrals, mail, and social. With this data you can discover things like:

• Who are the top spenders in display ads for a specific industry
• Who are the top spenders in PPC for a specific industry
• Which sites are doing the best job in SEO

Last, but definitely not least, a feature that is unique to Similarweb is the ‘Change’ feature. With Change, you can identify the biggest changes in traffic compared to the previous month, for any keyword or website in any industry.

For instance, Expedia is spending the most money on PPC compared to their competitors, but there are other smaller sites that are fighting to climb up and have the biggest change in traffic compared to last month:

Top sites getting traffic from paid search sorted by traffic share:

Top sites getting traffic from paid search sorted by change:

To summarize, Google Analytics’ new Benchmarking tool is amazing! You can actually see where you stand within your industry and start making data-driven decisions. However, as amazing as this tool is, it still doesn’t offer the deep dive into stats that Industry Analysis on the Similarweb platform provides – the ability to identify your actual competitors and each of the traffic channels you’ll be competing on. This is on top of the full list of top keywords per industry, which will serve you in your SEO and PPC campaigns.

Comparison Summary: