What Happened to Benchmarking in Google Analytics
If you’ve used Google Analytics for a long time, you may remember a time when GA gave you benchmarking data… for free!
Before the full migration to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the legacy properties, known as Universal Analytics (UA), included a very useful report in the Audience collection, called Benchmarking (pictured below).
This report offered aggregated benchmarking data that was sourced from other websites that had Google Analytics installed (and which had opted in to share benchmarking data). These benchmarking reports allowed you to see how your website compared to others for a range of metrics, like sessions and bounce rate.
I found this data to be incredibly useful, especially since other sources, like SimilarWeb, can be inaccurate at times.
Unfortunately, it seems that the benchmarking reports didn’t make it into GA4, as they’re currently nowhere to be found. And as someone who was a regular user of this data in the days of UA, this is disappointing to see.
But is it really gone?
Sadly, yes, as of today the benchmarking report in GA4 is not present at the time of writing, and there is no way to retrieve this data in your GA property.
But… there may be hope for the future. The admin panel for GA4 has a setting that actually makes reference to the benchmarking data.
To see this, go to your web property, click on Admin, then Account Details. From there, scroll down to the opt-in for Modelling contributions and business insights.
The text in this section read as follows (highlight is mine):
Enable features like predictions, modelled data and benchmarking that can provide you with richer business insights when you contribute aggregated measurement data. The data that you share (including information about the property from which it's shared) is aggregated and de-identified before being used to generate business insights
This is very similar to the opt-in setting you needed to configure in UA in order to retrieve the benchmarking data. And based on how this setting is worded, it sounds very much like Google is collecting this data, and may very well share it in the future.
If you have been a regular user of GA4 you will probably know that the release has been rocky, but that the product team at Google Analytics has been rolling out frequent updates. So I’m hopeful that they will bring this report back in the future.
But for now, I’m afraid there is no quick solution for retrieving Google Analytics benchmarks. That's why I suggest you focus on comparing them to your own historical performance. If you need some help doing this, check out my article on using what I call the 20% rule to benchmark success.
