I’ve been thinking about the new benchmarking feature in Google Analytics, and while I’ve signed up to see this data (it looks like it’ll take a few weeks before we’re actually seeing anything), I must admit that I’m a little concerned.

No, this isn’t another conspiracy theory about how Google is mis-using all the data they collect - it’s far simpler (and perhaps more serious than that).  My concern is that by reviewing benchmark numbers,  many marketers will settle for mediocrity.  If you look at the ‘average’ numbers published by Marketing Sherpa and others, you’ll see that about 5% is considered a typical conversion rate for B2B lead generation.  However, I’ve found that much higher numbers are possible (certainly into the teens and even as high as 40%) by the use of effective conversion best-practices, split testing, etc.

My feeling is that just because your site is doing as equally badly as everyone elses, that doesn’t mean that you should just live with it…

I haven’t even had time to check this out, but Google has just announced that it is offering ‘benchmarking’ in analytics.

Excerpt from the announcement:

The industry benchmarking feature is currently in beta. Once you have enabled benchmarking, it may take up to two weeks before the categorized, aggregated and anonymized benchmarking data shows up in your reports.

More information on the Google Analytics benchmarking service.