Google Analytics benchmarks: the checkbox that turns them on
On 10 August Google announced that you will be able to ask, in plain words, how your campaigns compare with similar businesses. The comparison itself has been sitting in your reports since May 2024. Whether you can see it comes down to three conditions, and the first one is a checkbox two clicks away.
The answer, up front. Google Analytics benchmarking compares your property against aggregated, anonymous data from similar businesses, reported as the centre of the group plus the 25th and 75th percentiles. It has been in the standard reports since 30 May 2024. Seeing it needs three things: data sharing switched on at account level, a sensible industry category, and a minimum volume Google does not publish.
What happened on 10 August. Google announced a set of AI features across Ads and Analytics. One of them lets you ask, in plain language, how your campaigns compare against your peers.
Why it is worth fifteen minutes. Because the checkbox is free and reversible, because a comparison changes how you read a mediocre number, and because below a certain size the benchmarks never arrive — and knowing you are below that line is useful in itself.
- Benchmarks have been in the standard Analytics reports since 30 May 2024.
- They compare you with anonymous groups of businesses in your industry category.
- They report the centre of the group plus the 25th and 75th percentiles.
- They appear only with data sharing enabled under Admin, Account Settings.
- Google requires a minimum volume of users but does not publish the threshold.
- Ask Advisor adds the plain-language request, but today it is English-only.
What this page is about
Benchmarking inside Google Analytics. The 10 August announcement ties the feature to Ask Advisor and to advertising campaigns, but the comparison in the Analytics reports has been there for two years and does not depend on anything you do in Google Ads.
The checkbox that turns benchmarks on
Start here, because everything else on this page depends on it.
Benchmarks only appear if your property contributes to the aggregate in return. The trade is stated openly: you give your numbers anonymously, you get everybody else's. The setting is called Modeling contributions & business insights and it lives under Admin > Account Settings.
It is not hidden, but it is in the place nobody looks: the settings of the account, not of the property. Whoever created the account years ago clicked past that screen and never went back. If you only have property-level access, you cannot see it at all — you need an account administrator.
The other half is worth saying too, and it does not flatter us: switching it on means your aggregated data joins the pool that feeds everybody else's benchmarks and Google's models. Aggregated and anonymous, and Google says so. If your company has a written policy on data sharing, this is a decision to take with whoever wrote it, not a box to tick in a hurry on a Tuesday.
What Google announced on 10 August
On Monday 10 August Google published a bundle of features for Google Ads and Google Analytics, all built around Ask Advisor, the assistant introduced at Google Marketing Live in May.
Four separate announcements, worth separating because they are at different stages:
- AI overviews on the Analytics home — what changed since your last visit. Rolling out, English, beta.
- Insight cards in Google Ads, including ones you generate by typing a request. Rolling out, English, beta.
- Dashboards from a written prompt, in both Ads and Analytics. Announced as coming.
- The comparison with similar businesses inside Ask Advisor in Analytics. Rolling out, English, beta.
The trade press picked up the last one: ask in plain words how your campaigns are doing against your peers, and the answer comes from anonymous averages of businesses like yours.
The comparison with your industry was not born on 10 August. It has been in the standard Google Analytics reports since 30 May 2024. What is new is being able to ask for it in words instead of finding it. If you have never seen those numbers, the missing assistant is almost certainly not the reason: a switch is.
What a Google Analytics benchmark actually compares
The short definition, the one to repeat in a meeting.
A Google Analytics benchmark is the comparison between your data and the aggregated, anonymous data of a group of businesses similar to yours, expressed in percentiles: where the centre of the group sits, and where the 25th and the 75th sit.
You do not pick the comparison group. It follows the industry category assigned to the property — the one somebody selected when the account was created, then refined by Google from the property's own attributes. If the wrong industry is in there, you are being compared against the wrong crowd with great precision. That is the first thing to check, and it takes thirty seconds.
Median, mean and percentiles, in four lines
Take five companies with conversion rates of 1%, 1.2%, 1.5%, 2% and 12%. The mean is 3.54%: read that, and four out of five feel like a disaster. The median is 1.5% — the value in the middle when you line them up. Same five companies, two numbers, opposite conclusions, and the second one is the honest one because a single outlier cannot drag it.
Percentiles work the same way. The 25th is the value a quarter of the group sits below; the 75th is the value three quarters sit below. When Google shows you a range between the 25th and the 75th, it is telling you where the middle half of your industry lives. Sitting inside that range means being normal, not being mediocre.
One translation note, because it matters if you read the localised help: the English page says median, while some localised versions say average. Read that centre number as the middle of the group, not as an arithmetic mean.
Where benchmarks appear, and since when
There is no screen called Benchmarks. The comparison figures show up inside reports you already use. Google's help page lists them:
"Benchmarking data is available in various standard Google Analytics reports, including the Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention reports, as well as on the Home page overview"
They have been available since 30 May 2024, so there are two years of history to look at. They do not show up if you set the date range to today.
Why you might see nothing at all
If you open the Acquisition report and find no comparison anywhere, there are four possible reasons. In the order we tend to find them in real accounts:
- Data sharing is off. Admin, Account Settings, Modeling contributions & business insights. The most common case by far, and one checkbox fixes it.
- The industry category is wrong or generic. Without a meaningful industry there is no group of similar businesses to belong to.
- Your volume is below the threshold. Google's own wording is unambiguous about the requirement and silent about the number: properties "must also have a minimum volume of users and be generating a minimum volume of meaningful data in order to be included in a peer group".
- The date range does not qualify. Benchmarks do not appear for today, and they do not exist before 30 May 2024.
We looked for that minimum in three of Google's help pages, in two languages. The threshold is named every time and quantified none of them. So we are not going to invent it. What we can say is that it exists, and that below it a ticked checkbox brings you nothing.
The first two you can fix yourself in five minutes. The third is not a settings problem: it is a traffic problem, which is a different job.
Is Ask Advisor available outside English?
No, not yet. Google's documentation is unusually clear about it, and the sentence is worth more than any commentary:
"Ask Advisor is currently available in properties where English is the selected language and we expect to expand support to other languages."
Which makes the checkbox above the only thing actually worth doing today if your property runs in Italian, Romanian, German or anything else. The benchmarks in the standard reports do not speak English: they are numbers in a table, and they have been there for two years.
Changing your property language to English to get the assistant is technically possible, and we would not do it for something in beta. It changes formats and report names for everyone with access, for a feature Google says it plans to extend anyway. The cost is daily, the benefit is temporary.
We tried it: what 300 sessions look like
The chronology first, otherwise the number means nothing.
The current version of cittago.com went live on 6 July 2026. We built the foundations until 24 July, and from 27 July we started working seriously on content, search and visibility inside AI assistants. That is a few weeks, and it is the whole story these numbers tell.
Here is what our own Google Analytics reports for the twenty-eight days from 14 July to 10 August 2026, read through the API on the day of publication:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Active users | 161 |
| New users | 150 |
| Sessions | 300 |
| Engaged sessions | 182 |
| Page views | 1,088 |
| Average engagement time per session | 106.9 seconds |
In the twenty-eight days before the new site, 14 June to 11 July, there were 19 sessions. Going from 19 to 300 in a month is a nice jump and means almost nothing: it is the difference between a site nobody touches and a site somebody works on daily. Ask us again in three or six months 😉
And here is the point of this page. At 300 sessions in twenty-eight days we probably will not see an industry benchmark at all — we are under the minimum volume Google names without quantifying. And if it did appear, being compared with the median digital studio worldwide would not tell us what to do on Monday morning.
That is the same position most small company websites are in: a few hundred sessions a month, an industry picked at random in 2019, and a reasonable question — "are these numbers any good?" — that a benchmark, at this size, does not answer.
Before and after, in a table
In practice, for anyone already using Google Analytics, the announcement changes less than it sounds.
| Question | Before the announcement | After the announcement |
|---|---|---|
| Does a comparison with my industry exist? | Yes, since 30 May 2024 | Yes, the same one |
| Where do I find it? | Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, Retention | The same reports, plus in words if you have Ask Advisor |
| Does it need a setting? | Yes, business insights data sharing | Yes, the same one. Nothing changed |
| Can I have it in my language? | The reports, yes | The reports yes, the assistant no |
| Does it work at any site size? | No, there is a minimum volume | No, the same minimum volume |
What you need to use it
- Administrator access to the Analytics account, not just to the property. The data-sharing setting lives at account level and property-only access cannot see it.
- The right industry category. Check what is in there: it defines who you are being compared with. A hotel filed under "Other" is compared against nothing in particular.
- Traffic above a threshold Google does not publish. If you have a few dozen sessions a day, plan for seeing nothing, and treat that as normal.
- A conversion definition that means something. Comparing your conversion rate against the industry median only helps if "conversion" means a real enquiry on your site, not a click on a page.
- Fifteen minutes, once. After that the comparison is simply there every time you open the report.
What a benchmark will not tell you
- Whether your campaign is any good. It tells you where you sit against a group. Those are two different questions, and the second one is answered by looking at the searches you paid for, not at percentiles.
- Who is in the group. It is anonymous and aggregated by design. You will never know whether it contains your competitor down the road or an American site with a hundred times your budget.
- That your category is wrong. A badly classified property gets a comparison that is precise and useless at the same time.
- Anything about your custom metrics. Benchmarks cover a set of standard metrics; whatever you built yourself has no counterpart.
- How much you should spend. That depends on what a customer is worth to you, and no industry median can do that arithmetic on your behalf.
It is exactly why, when we take over an account, the first week is not spent comparing ourselves to anyone: it is spent fixing what gets counted as a conversion. A benchmark tells you where you are; what moves the number is campaign structure and the definition of the thing you are measuring. If that part is the part you need, it is what we do in Google Ads campaign management.
Glossary, in two columns
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Benchmark | The reference value of a group of businesses like yours, against which you read your own number. |
| Peer group | The anonymous set you are compared with. It follows the property's industry category, not a choice of yours. |
| Median | The value exactly in the middle. Half the group sits below, half above. Outliers cannot move it. |
| Percentile | A position in the queue. The 25th is the value a quarter of the group sits below, the 75th the value three quarters sit below. |
| Ask Advisor | Google's assistant, introduced in May 2026, available in beta in properties where the selected language is English. |
| Engaged session | A visit longer than ten seconds, or with a conversion, or with at least two pages viewed. |
Three levels: find yours
- You do not know whether data sharing is on. First level. Open Admin, Account Settings, look for Modeling contributions & business insights. Two minutes, and you know whether you already have benchmarks.
- The setting is on and no benchmarks appear. Second level. Check the industry category, then the volume: below a certain amount of traffic you join no group at all. If that is you, the useful comparison is not with your industry, it is with yourself last month.
- Benchmarks are there and you are below the median. Third level, and the interesting one. The question stops being "how am I doing" and becomes "which channel is holding me down". That answer is in the Acquisition report, channel by channel, and that is where the work starts.
If you are at the second level and what you are missing is traffic rather than a comparison, the problem to solve is a different one. We wrote up our own version of it, with real numbers, in four days old, and second in five countries and in why PageSpeed says 68 on mobile and 96 on desktop.
Questions nobody has actually asked us
The announcement is a day old, so nobody has written to us about it. These are the questions we would ask reading it cold, plus the ones that come up every time a client looks at a number and asks whether it is good.
Why don't I see any benchmarks in Google Analytics?
The most common cause is that data sharing is switched off. It is called Modeling contributions & business insights and it lives under Admin, Account Settings. If it is on and you still see nothing, the likely causes are a generic industry category or your traffic sitting below the minimum volume Google requires and does not publish.
Is switching data sharing on risky for my business?
What leaves is aggregated and anonymous, not your customer list. It is still a decision: you are contributing to a pool that feeds other people's benchmarks and Google's models. If your company has a written data-sharing policy, have whoever wrote it read the setting description before you tick it.
Exactly who am I being compared against?
An anonymous group built from the industry category assigned to your property. You cannot see who is in it and you cannot choose it. You can check the category, and that is the first thing to do: if it is wrong, the comparison is precise and meaningless.
Do I need Ask Advisor to see benchmarks?
No. The benchmarks live in the standard reports and have been there since 30 May 2024. Ask Advisor lets you request them in plain language instead of finding them. It is currently available only in properties where the selected language is English.
Should I switch my property language to English to get it?
We would not, for a beta feature. Changing the language changes report names and number formats for everyone with access, and Google has said it expects to extend support to other languages. The cost is daily; the advantage is temporary.
How is this different from the benchmarks agencies publish?
This is the most useful distinction on the page. Published industry benchmarks are averages over one agency's client base, often in another country and another year. This one is computed by Google over the group your property actually belongs to, on the dates you choose.
Does it work for a site with very little traffic?
Probably not, and that is worth knowing rather than fighting. Tick the box anyway, it takes two minutes, then ignore the comparison for a few months. Below a certain size the only paragraph that tells you anything is the one comparing you with yourself: same period last year, or last month.
Does the comparison cover paid campaigns too?
Yes, and that is the angle of the 10 August announcement: the comparison is offered on campaigns. One caution though: two accounts can call wildly different things a conversion, a submitted form or a click on a phone number. Before comparing yourself with anyone, look at what you are counting.
Is a percentile better than an average for this?
For a group with outliers in it, yes, and Analytics uses percentiles for exactly that reason. One large company with an unusual conversion rate moves an average and cannot move a median. Reading a range between the 25th and the 75th tells you where the middle half of your industry sits.
What do you look at first when a client asks whether their numbers are good?
The conversion definition, then the client's own history. The industry benchmark comes third, when it exists at all. A conversion rate of 1.2% is neither good nor bad on its own: it depends on what you are counting and what one enquiry is worth to your business.
Last updated: 11 August 2026. The announcement of the AI features for Google Ads and Analytics is dated 10 August 2026 on Google's blog. The wording about percentiles, the reports that include benchmarks, the 30 May 2024 date, the data-sharing setting and the minimum volume all come from Google Analytics help pages, quoted directly. The sentence about Ask Advisor being available only in English-language properties comes from its own help page. Our own figures were read from the Google Analytics API on 11 August 2026. We will update this page when the assistant reaches other languages.
