In my last post, I wrote about content targeted ad networks like Google AdSense.  One point that I made is that content targeted ads tend to have lower conversion rates than standard PPC ads on search engine results pages.  Your mileage may vary, but this is useful data when you're beginning PPC advertising.  This comparison got me thinking of another comparison – benchmarked data.

There are various services available today that offer industry benchmarked data.  This type of data presents the average visitor count, conversion rate, time on site, etc, of similar types of Web sites (e.g. medium sized e-commerce sites or B2B lead generation sites) or in some cases, even specific sites.  At first blush, this sounds pretty cool.  Who’s winning the Web site decathlon? Check the benchmark scoreboard, right?  But is it actually useful?  

If you are running a content site, which makes money based on raw traffic, this benchmark might be interesting.  But still, what are you going to do differently by knowing that a competitor has more traffic than you?  Or less traffic?  Perhaps analyzing industry benchmarks might motivate an investigation into the visitor behavior on your own site, but in the end, it’s an investigation of your own visitor behavior that will help you make improvements to your Web site and marketing efforts.

I’m interested in hearing what other people think.  Is benchmarked data useful? Are you able to get actionable insights from benchmark information?  If so, I’d love to hear about it.

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