The Google Analytics team made quite recently made an unusual and curios choice. They transformed the old “benchmarking” report in a newsletter.
Most probably you’ve come across of this if you have a Google Account to which Analytics has been connected.
Why it is curious?
GA, as well as all the other web analytics package got us used to dig into their system in order to retrieve the information, and not to serve them in a “ready to go” newsletter.
Of course this is the “first draft”, and as such it can be easily considered as an experiment. All the data to which the GA team referred to have been aggregated and – of course – anonymised while covering a three-month timeframe (November the 1st 2010 up to February the 1st 2011). It has not been revealed whether or not the timeframe will remain the same or the timescale adopted was just to support the future newsletter and make comparisons.
They have also included some pitch “useful” details like countries’ specific average bounce rate. However, it could be useless at the same time considering the wide range of the aggregated sites.
As I’ve received two newsletters, one in Italian and one in English, I assume Google translated the newsletters in many different languages.
Is the report better or worse than the news-letter?
Although the insights aren’t earth-shattering, it’s nice to read some comments written directly by Google. However, because of the aggregation made, it is now impossible to determine what is happening on a specific industry level.
At least, before the first issue of the newsletter, thanks to the report available if a company or a freelancer was managing a number of site belongings all to the same industry, it would have been easier to make some sort of assumption, which at the moment is no longer possible.
This post is a free translation of the Italian article published on Go Analytics.