I know the Google Analytics Benchmarking feature was released in March, but I'm bringing it up again because I was reminded of it after receiving several recent Google email notifications. In summary, companies or website owners running Google Analytics on their websites now have the ability to anonymously share their metrics.

The benefit is they get insight into the metrics of others who are also choosing to share. So if you are running Google Analytics on your "shopping site" you can now see how your web stats compare to other shopping sites. The degree of categorization is obviously still in the works - and the value of this benchmarking effort should only increase as you are able to compare your stats to sites that are closest to what you would consider competition.

How will this get better? As a search marketer, the granularity of comparison you would hope for would be at the keyword level. If the benchmarking tool would pull keywords from the titles and meta descriptions that corresponded with your own website, then benchmark other sites using the same or similar keywords, that would be sweet!