Google’s new Ask Advisor compares your Google Analytics campaign performance with anonymized averages from similar businesses, helping you see how you’re doing.
Josh Moser, Senior Director of Product Management, shared the news in a blog post, highlighting it as one of the updates across Google Ads and Google Analytics.
This new benchmarking feature is accessible through Ask Advisor, the cross-product tool Google introduced at Google Marketing Live in May.
What The Benchmark Does #
The comparison uses anonymized averages from similar businesses. It runs through Ask Advisor, the agent Google introduced at Google Marketing Live in May to work across Google Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center and Google Marketing Platform. Google marks Ask Advisor as available in beta for English-language accounts.
It allows you to ask how you’re doing in plain language and receive a response like the one in the example below:
Background
Google’s documentation says benchmarking reports the median and the 25th and 75th percentiles for a peer group of businesses in your industry category, across the Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization and Retention reports and the Home page overview.
Your property needs Modeling contributions & business insights turned on in Admin, and your peer group comes from the industry category chosen at setup plus signals from your URLs and app attributes.
You can change that peer group, as Google offers 25 top-level categories with subcategories beneath each one, down to a level like athletic shoes.
The announcement doesn’t say whether the Ask Advisor benchmark uses that peer group or builds its own. It also doesn’t say whether the Modeling contributions setting gates it the way it gates existing benchmarking.
Why This Matters #
A benchmark is only useful if the businesses in it look like yours. Analytics builds your peer group from the industry category set when the property was created, and you can change that category in Admin.
Check that category before the comparison arrives. Google’s Merchant Center reporting doesn’t give you that control, as I covered when the pilot opened in July.
Also In The Announcement #
Google Analytics now shows what the company calls ‘AI Overviews’ at the top of the page, summarizing what changed since your last login. These are Analytics summaries, not the AI Overviews that appear in Search results. You can opt into notifications by phone or email and set how often they arrive.
Here’s an example of how that will look:
Additionally, the company announced Google Ads is getting insights cards personalized to your business, plus a new Dashboards feature that builds charts from text prompts. Dashboards is coming to Google Analytics without a date. Google marks Ask Advisor, the Ads insights cards, and Dashboards as available in beta for English-language accounts.
Looking Ahead #
Google didn’t say when the benchmark reaches accounts. When it does, expect a range rather than a single number, since Analytics benchmarks report a median with a spread around it.