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Read the full blog post/release here:
We’re happy to announce the launch of two related new Google Analytics features: a beta version of industry benchmarking and a data-sharing settings page. Both are designed to give our customers more choice and better control over their data. We are also launching an integration with Audio Ads today, which we’ll discuss in more detail in tomorrow’s post.
Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide
actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how
their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.
You can also compare your site against an industry vertical different than your own. For example, you might see that your industry’s traffic dips at certain times of the year while another industry’s traffic increases. Based on that information, you could explore cross promotional opportunities to drive traffic back and forth.
Of course, benchmarking only works if people can opt to share their
data into the system, so we’re also introducing a new data-sharing
settings page. On this page, customers can choose whether to opt in or opt out of sharing their Analytics data. To be clear, we are not
sharing individual data with competitors; we bucket data into industry verticals and then anonymize and aggregate the data. Once you opt in, it may take a couple weeks for the reports to populate.
You can also elect to share your data with other Google services. This setting will allow us to provide you with additional advanced new features. For example, many of you have asked us to integrate
Conversion Optimizer (which is currently only available to AdWords
Conversion Tracking users) into Google Analytics. By opting to share
your data with Google, you’ll be able to take advantage of these
related new features as they become available.
interesting, but i have 2 main concerns:
1 – Banchmarking is dangerous if not proprerly done and can easily lead to very wrong conclusions and assumptions.
When you banchmark you want that to be done proprerly. Who is going to assign the web site to the related vertical? anyone on google side will check that http://www.sitename.com is not a familty-Lyfestyle site but an internet-technology site or a Blog? I can declare anything I like, and if no one else checks….
so here is how the big G declares they address this topic:
“When benchmarking is enabled, Google crawls the websites in the account then categorizes them by vertical and the amount of visits. The data is then made anonymous through aggregation.”
But word-semantyc recognition can be difficult, right? if their crawler picked up a wrong word to decide which categoy mi site will fall into there will be a mess…
but wait a minute… will G. care?
Of course not, because how will we be able to figure out if they done something wrongly?
the aggregated data is completly anonymous, and therefore no sites will appear in any ranking…. and there is no way to understand if the vertical you think you have selected is really counting the same content-type.
2 – Google gives and takes. In the long run will take X times more what they give (it’s FREE, remember this!). Of course they ask you to opt-in, but they will almost oblige you to do so, otherwise you won’t get the coolest latest features. Then what hapens? only G. knows…