One of the most common questions I’m asked at workshops is “So, what kind of numbers are other schools getting?” This makes total sense, we want to know how we stack up. I work with dozens of schools across the country and have seen their numbers, so yes, I suppose I do have the data to provide some general ranges, but here’s why I recommend you proceed with caution in benchmarking.

We work in an amazing industry, with passionate people who are helping to make our collective future a better place through education. But our websites are really, really complicated. They’re old (the web was born on college campuses). They’re big. They’re often built in deep technology, personnel and strategy silos.

I have rarely started working with a school and found their analytics set up correctly. (To be fair, that’s often why I’m brought in to help in the first place.) Inaccurate referral information, artificially inflated sessions and artificially low pages per session metrics run rampant due to multiple properties, missing or outdated code and lack of an overarching analytics strategy.

One place we really want to know how we stack up is on conversions, however many higher education institutions don’t have any Google Analytics goals set up. For those that do, the complexity of higher education websites causes us to track our digital goals at many different thresholds. For example, you might be able to track a goal conversion on the thank you page of your application. However, your competition might be using a 3^rd party application and only be able to track their user to the offsite link that sends them to the application so they’re tracking an event as their goal.

Comparing apples to oranges? More like apples to steak sandwiches.

I know, I know, a little bit more doom and gloom that you’re probably used to with my posts. I promise I’ll share some positive things with the warnings!

Here’s some good news: Google recently announced in-tool benchmarking reports for channels, locations and devices. Get excited, there’s a specific channel just for colleges and universities! Everything I’ve stated is still true, I strongly urge you to keep these limitations in mind when looking at these reports. However, I think it’s incredibly positive that Google moving this way and promises to keep making advancements here. By giving us the data within the tool, they already are way ahead of trying to group data together manually.

I also have a lot of hope that with the impending switch to Universal Analytics, many colleges and universities will invest some time and effort into fixing their current tracking problems and these reports will begin to be more useful.

What do you think of the new benchmarking reports? Will you use them?

Here’s a quick video to help you find the benchmarking reports: