Benchmarking in GA4

August 27, 2025

How are your competitors doing?

Who knows!

Well, now you sort of can – with GA4 benchmarking.

GA4 has a built-in, and often overlooked, feature that gives you precisely this context.

And it’s a brilliant way to understand how you’re performing against other businesses in your industry, revealing your strengths, weaknesses, and where your biggest opportunities lie.

Table of Contents

What is GA4 Benchmarking?

At its core, GA4 Benchmarking pools anonymised data from other businesses that have opted in, allowing you to compare your key metrics against industry standards.

It doesn’t show you competitor X’s exact data, of course.

Instead, it presents the data in percentiles:

  • The Median: The middle-of-the-road performance for your peer group.

  • The 25th Percentile: The performance level that 75% of your peers exceed.

  • The 75th Percentile: The performance level that only 25% of your peers achieve.

Privacy

Now, the first question on everyone’s mind is privacy. 

When you enable benchmarking, your data is encrypted, aggregated with others, and remains entirely private.

Google applies data thresholding, meaning properties must have a minimum volume of users and data to even be included.

This ensures the data quality is high and your individual performance is protected.

Finding Your Benchmarking Data

Before you can dive in, you need to make sure you’re eligible. In your GA4 property, head to Admin > Account Details and ensure the ‘Modeling contributions and business insights’ setting is enabled.

Data Modelling enabled

Once that’s sorted, finding the data is straightforward:

  1. Navigate to the Home section in your GA4 property.

  2. In the overview, find the metric card you want to analyse (e.g., Engagement rate, Users, Transactions per purchaser).

  3. Click on the metric name at the top of the card. A dropdown menu will appear.

  4. You should see an option for Benchmarking. Select it.

And just like that, you’ll see your performance data overlaid with industry benchmarks. The data refreshes every 24 hours, giving you a near-real-time view.

Benchmarking Metrics in GA4

The avaialable metrics are:

  • New user rate
  • Average engagement time per session
  • Average engagement time per user
  • Average session duration
  • Engagement rate
  • Engaged sessions per user
  • Event count per user
  • Events per session
  • Session key event rate
  • Sessions per user
  • User key event rate
  • Views per session
  • Views per user
  • Bounce rate
  • Daily active users / Monthly active users (DAU / MAU)
  • Daily active users / Weekly active users (DAU / WAU)
  • Weekly active users / Monthly active users (WAU / MAU)
  • Add to carts per user
  • Average revenue per user (ARPU)
  • Average revenue per paying user (ARPPU)
  • Average purchase revenue per user
  • Checkouts per user
  • First-time purchaser rate (FTP rate)
  • First-time purchasers per new user
  • Paying monthly active users / Daily active users (PMAU / DAU)
  • Paying weekly active users / Daily active users (PWAU / DAU)
  • Total ad revenue per user
  • Transactions per purchaser
  • Transactions per user

How to Read the Benchmarking Report

Once enabled, your trendline chart will transform. Here’s what you’re looking at:

  • The Solid Line: This is you. It’s your property’s performance for that specific metric over time.

  • The Dotted Line: This is the industry median. It represents the 50th percentile for your peer group.

  • The Shaded Area: This is the range between the 25th and 75th percentiles, showing you where the bulk of your peers are performing.

You can hover over any point on the chart to see the specific numbers for that day. You can also edit your peer group to ensure you’re comparing apples with apples.

Understanding the report benchmark data

Changing your peer group

Google categorises peer groups based on shared industry characteristics.

But you can change your peer group.

To do this, click on the benchmarking button (looks like a medal to me) and underneath benchmarking peer group you can choose your peer group.

Benchmarking peer group

The Peer groups are:

  • Arts & Entertainment
  • Autos & Vehicles
  • Beauty & Fitness
  • Books & Literature
  • Business & Industrial
  • Computers & Electronics
  • Finance
  • Food & Drink
  • Games
  • Health
  • Hobbies & Leisure
  • Home & Garden
  • Internet & Telecom
  • Jobs & Education
  • Law & Government
  • News
  • Online Communities
  • People & Society
  • Pets & Animals
  • Real Estate
  • Reference
  • Science
  • Shopping
  • Sports
  • Travel & Transportation

And you can choose subcategories underneath this too.

Data Caveat

This is where we move from just looking at data to properly analysing it.

Benchmarking is incredibly powerful, but it comes with one massive caveat: its accuracy depends on everyone else’s GA4 setup being correct.

And let’s be frank, that isn’t always the case. I’ve audited too many GA4’s to know that simply isn’t the case.

Consider these two common scenarios:

  1. Inflated Engagement Rate: Engagement rate is triggered by a session lasting longer than 10 seconds, having a key event, rv involving 2+ page views. What if another business has incorrectly set up a page_view or session_start event as a key event? Their engagement rate would be artificially, and dramatically, inflated.

  2. Inflated New Users: If a competitor has a poorly configured consent banner that doesn’t fire analytics cookies correctly, GA4 might count every returning visitor as a ‘new user’, skewing their numbers upwards.

This doesn’t make the data useless. It just means you should use it as a directional guide, not as absolute gospel.

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With that context in mind, you can start drawing some genuinely useful conclusions.

  • If your Engagement Rate is consistently above the 75th percentile…

    • Insight: Fantastic! This suggests your content is resonating and your site experience is stickier than most. Your users are more engaged than those on competitor sites. Double down on what’s working. Or it could mean you’ve messed up somewhere too fyi.

  • If your Transactions per Purchaser are way below the median…

    • Insight: This is a red flag. Your customers are buying, but not as frequently as customers of other businesses. It’s time to ask why. Is your post-purchase follow-up lacking? Could you implement a loyalty programme or do a better job of encouraging returning users to make that next purchase?

    • If your Views per User hovers around the median, sometimes dipping below…

      • Insight: This suggests your user journey might have some friction. Are your calls to action clear? Are you effectively guiding users to the next logical step on your site? This benchmark indicates there’s room for improvement in how you entice users to explore more content.

Putting It All Together

GA4 Benchmarking isn’t a perfect, flawless mirror of the competitive landscape.

But it is an incredibly valuable compass.

It provides the context you need to move beyond simply reporting on your own numbers and start making genuinely data-informed decisions.

Use it to spot your outliers—both good and bad—and let it guide your strategic focus.

It will help you ask better questions and, ultimately, drive better results for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

 

Q1: How often does GA4 benchmarking data update?

The benchmarking data is refreshed every 24 hours, so the insights you see are always current.

Q2: What are the requirements to use GA4 benchmarking?

Your GA4 property must have the ‘Modeling contributions and business insights’ setting enabled in your account settings. Additionally, your property needs to meet minimum thresholds for user volume and data generation to be included in a peer group.

Q3: Can I choose my specific competitors in GA4 benchmarking?

No, you cannot select individual competitors to benchmark against. GA4 automatically places you in a ‘peer group’ based on your industry category and other factors to ensure all data remains anonymous and aggregated. You can, however, refine the peer group settings to get a more relevant comparison.

Kyle

Author

Hello, I'm Kyle Rushton McGregor!

I’m an experienced GA4 Specialist with a demonstrated history of working with Google Tag Manager and Looker Studio. I’m an international speaker who has trained 1000s of people on all things analytics.

Find out more About me
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