Just clearing through my inbox and found Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter. This is exceptionally useful for most of my clients.
Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter 2011, Volume 1, July 2011 |
1. IntroductionWelcome to the first volume of the Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter! This month, we are replacing the standard “benchmarking” report in your Google Analytics account with data shared in this newsletter. We are using this newsletter as an experiment to surface more useful or interesting data to Analytics users. Data contained here comes from all websites which have opted-in anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics. Only those website administrators which have enabled this anonymous data sharing will receive this “benchmarking” newsletter. You may be wondering, how many websites are in this “anonymous data sharing” pool? Currently, hundreds of thousands, and we’ve endeavored to make all of the metrics here statistically significant. The date range of comparison for this newsletter is from November 1, 2010 - February 1, 2011. Comparison is done with data from November 1, 2009 - February 1, 2010. Absolute metrics such as total # visits, pageviews, or conversions for all opted-in websites are not reported. To simplify the prose, the phrase “websites” will represent “websites which have opted into anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics” for the rest of this newsletter. 2. Site MetricsCompared to a year ago, websites have seen reduced pages / visit, average time on site, as well as bounce rate.
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. 2.2 Breakdown by Traffic SourcesTraffic 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.
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. 3. Traffic SourcesTraffic 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.
Happy analyzing, Google Analytics Team |