when I look at myself I despair, when I compare myself I take comfort

In the web field, the notion of performance is entirely relative. That is why the “Benchmarking Report”, sent by Google yesterday to all Google Analytics administrators, is a valuable tool.

It provides orders of magnitude and benchmarks to determine where your clients’ sites or your own site stand compared with the average of websites worldwide.

Of course, these indications must be taken with a grain of salt: an average ratio often hides major disparities depending on the nature of the site (mass-market forum or niche B2B industry) and its purpose (e-commerce, showcase site).

Main metrics (French sites only)*

For France, the main metrics are as follows:
Average bounce rate: 49.7%
Pages per visit: 4.4
Average time spent on the site: 4 min 40 sec

Main metrics by traffic source*

The bounce rate is highest for organic search engine results and lowest for sponsored links (CPC results). In the first case, it is the search engine that “chooses” the landing page. In the second, it is the advertiser who makes that choice, which may explain better performance due to effective “landing pages”.

Visitors coming from referring sites are the ones who spend the most time on the site, which is no surprise (the power of recommendation).

Breakdown of visitors by traffic source*

Two comments regarding these figures:

1. Direct access remains the main traffic source. Working on your offline brand awareness and having a domain name that is easy to remember therefore remain decisive elements for the success of a web strategy.
2. The “Others” category remains a bit of a mystery to me. It probably includes sponsored links from the Display network, since the Search network should logically be part of the “Search engines” category.