Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

So many great news today! First Omniture’s announcement about the Baidu, then the news that Google Analytics has a new Benchmarking function. Lets talk about the GA Benchmarking first, so I can focus on Omniture / Baidu in a longer post during the weekend.

Why Benchmarking?
Reporting is easy, providing actionable recommendation is less so. In an earlier past I recommended a 3 step approach based on answering 3 simple questions:

1. Is this number good or bad?
2. Why is the numbers good or bad?
3. What can we do to improve this metric and is it worth the effort?

In order to answer questions 1 and 2 it is critical to know how well other players (especially competitors) are doing, since comparing just to your own numbers will leave you in bubble without context for question 1 and without best practices for question 2. Find more details in Avinash’s post on competitive intelligence.

Why is this announcement so important for China?
Regular readers of this blog might remember my rants about the lack of benchmarks in China. While you can benchmark you reach (unique visitors) with some accuracy using IResearch’s iUserTracker, key industry benchmarks like CPC, CTR or Bounce rate are unavailable in China. There is not even an industry organization like the IAB that
conceivably could report such numbers. As long as you don’t have a large sample of clients or long experience in the market, you are out of luck (just barely avoided a 4 letter word here)

How useful will it be?
Well, that depends. I just singed up for the service (you need to agree to share you own data anonymously first) and will share more comments in the future, but I see a number of limitations.

• The benchmark needs to be relevant to my industry, GA allows you to choose among a number of verticals to address this issue. So the value will depend on how close this match is.
• The benchmark needs to be relevant to my geography. Most benchmarks are widely different in China than they are in the US (or in Japan, or in Germany for that matter). So far it seems this problem is not addressed. That is a key weakness for us poor web analytics souls in China an without this feature, GA benchmark will remain a nice graph is the system.

Yours truly will of course immediately get in touch with his local Google resources and see what he can did up. Stay tuned for more. [Update: My friends at Google confirmed that the benchmark is global. No luck for the wicked]

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