I spend a lot of time looking at analytics numbers. There are 9-10 client Google accounts that I look at (most daily), plus RD2 analytics for our site, blog, and adwords account. It’s a lot of numbers.

It’s fairly safe to say that every single time I present a first analytics report to a client or potential client… no matter how much work I put into graphing and organizing the numbers and adding notes … I get the same question: “Is that good?”

Because every industry is different and every company has different goals, it’s a question that’s difficult to answer. Here’s what we do know.

Neilsen releases a global index of Home internet use each month, with the following results for September of 2008:

The average web surfer visits 1,489 pages on 68 domains – that’s approximately 21.9 pages per site per month. And the average user spends 47 seconds on a page.

Looking at web usage for the U.S., the numbers are very similar:

We also have to keep in mind that sites like Facebook, MySpace, and web based e-mail – where visitors are viewing multiple times a day and spending several minutes at a time on the site – are skewing the average some. In March, American Facebook users spent almost 90 minutes browsing Facebook. If each user spent the average 47 seconds per page, they would view 115 pages. More than likely, users are spending a few minutes on a small number of pages and just a few seconds on the bulk of the other 1,489 (the 80/20 rule – though in this case, I’d guess it was more like 90/10).

E-commerce Benchmarks

Studies have been done on e-commerce site benchmarks. A study on e-commerce site benchmarks by Pindar found:

• Most e-commerce site visitors do not enter shopping sites through the home page
• The best performing e-commerce sites achieve conversions of over 8%, four times the average
• A well-performing site gets one third of all visitors to the shopping cart
• Shopping cart bail out rates average 44%, although the most successful can achieve less than 30%

How to determine your own benchmarks

When looking at analytics, you have to keep your own situation in mind. If you are creating a website for your membership of 100,000 who traditionally interacts with you offline, seeing 50% of those users interacting with you online is a very solid baseline.

If you’ve started a blog from scratch and are looking for healthy conversation to start rolling around your brand, focus on quality of visits instead of quantity.

In my experience, the most effective way to determine your own benchmark data is to start tracking metrics using Google Analytics, and watch the numbers to determine your own baseline and what your own average visitor looks like.

Building on the baseline

The best thing about Google Analytics is that it is robust AND free. This gives you the freedom to experiment – try different content, features, images, etc. and see if they affect engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site, etc.

Use resources like the Google Analytics URL builder to tag links in your e-mail campaigns and see how they affect your traffic. Pay close attention to your referring links to see if there is potential for working with bloggers who are already talking about you (both critics and fans). Look at things like search terms to see what kind of content visitors out on the web find you can provide.

Once you’ve determined your own benchmarks, keep them close at hand to measure your progress.