Last year Google announced a nifty new feature to Google Analytics called Benchmarking. Benchmarking allows you to compare your website to similar-sized websites in the same industry vertical. Websites are grouped based on the number of visitors they receive and are classified as small, medium or large.

You can only view statistics for websites of a similar size to yours, for instance if you have a medium-sized website you can only view benchmarking data for medium-sized websites. In any given vertical there are a minimum of 100 websites participating and their information is used to aggregate the benchmarking data for that specific vertical. Below are some of the areas for which benchmarking data is available:

• The number of visitors over a certain time period to your website compared to the average number of visits to similar-sized websites during the same period
• Your website’s bounce rate compared to other websites of a similar size
• The number of page views your website received over a certain time period compared to the number of page views of similar sized websites over the same period
• The average time visitors spent on your website in relation to competitor websites
• The number of new visitors to your website compared to the number of new visitors to competing websites

In order to have access to the benchmarking feature you have to opt-in and share your data with Google. Google removes all information that can be used to identify your website and your data is combined with hundreds (or even thousands) of other anonymous websites in your vertical. This information is then made available to all participants and allows website owners to identify potential opportunities by allowing them to analyse trends in their and other industries. Very handy indeed!

The importance of having a well-designed and user-friendly website has been highlighted many times, yet once the website design and development processes are complete, that’s really only the beginning! Maintaining a website requires a constant investment of time and effort and in our opinion a website should always be regarded as “a work in progress”.

It is important to measure what happens on your website; for instance how visitors find it, where they enter the website and how they engage with your content and navigation. To measure these actions easily, web marketers make use of analytics programmes like Google Analytics.

One of the main benefits of web analytics is that it helps website owners gain a better understanding of what visitors want by analysing their actions on the website. Among other things, Analytics will show you:

• The source of your traffic; for instance direct traffic, traffic from search engines or referring websites
• The average amount of time visitors spent on the website
• Visitor loyalty (whether the majority of visits are new or returning)
• Your most popular content
• Geographic locations of your visitors with a map overlay that shows where in the world visitors are accessing your website
• You will also be able to see technical details such as which are the most commonly used Internet browsers, or the connection speed of your visitors

The above mentioned are just a few of the aspects of a website that can be measured. Analytics will highlight the areas on a website that can be improved (i.e. pages with a high exit rate) and areas that are performing well. As part of an optimisation strategy Analytics will point out which keywords are performing well. This information can be used to increase organic traffic to the website.

Since Analytics is focused on measuring user engagement, it is important to allocate goals to your website. Goals can include visitors filling in a contact form, downloading a brochure, signing up for a newsletter and so forth. The conversion rate indicated the percentage of visitors to a website that complete an assigned goal or task. As such, it’s an important benchmark used to show a site’s effectiveness.

Within Google Analytics there is a very useful and insightful benchmarking function (found under the Visitors tab) that allows website owners to compare their website to similar-sized websites in the same industry. Comparison criteria include visits, bounce rate, page views, average time on the website, number of pages visited and new visits.

Essentially, Analytics will help you improve your website on a continuous basis to provide your visitors with the best content and usability in order to increase conversions. Do you have questions about Analytics? Ask us, we offer one-on-one or team Analytics training on request.

Yahoo! and Twitter have reached an agreement that will allow Yahoo! to integrate Twitter with a number of its websites like Yahoo! Sport, Yahoo! News and others. Yahoo! has a global network of 600 million users and formed a similar partnership with Facebook last December that allows Yahoo! users to share Flickr photos on Facebook as well as view and send status updates from Yahoo! websites.

The increasing popularity of social networking websites is clearly visible by Twitter’s growth. In 2007 Twitter processed about 5,000 tweets per day. This number has grown by 1,400% and according to Twitter they are now processing about 50-million tweets per day.

Google and Bing integrated real-time Twitter results with their search results months ago. A little late to the party, Yahoo! announced the partnership via cryptic clues on their Twitter profile.

According to Mashable.com the partnership between Yahoo! and Twitter means:

• Yahoo! users will be able to access their Twitter feed via Yahoo! and see the most recent tweets in their Twitter feed
• Yahoo! will become a Twitter client thus allowing users to update their Twitter status and share content from Yahoo!
• Twitter results will be integrated with Yahoo! Search (with immediate effect)

If you are a Yahoo! user, will you make use of the new Yahoo! / Twitter service? Read the formal announcements by both parties on Twitter’s blog and Yahoo’s website.