To run a successful marketing campaign, you need to understand where you’re starting. As the campaign launches, you’ll want to know how you’re stacking up against competitors and, as time goes on, you’ll want to measure your results against your past performance. It’s only by understanding where you were, and where you’re going, that you can achieve real growth.

What Is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the process marketers use to gauge how well they’re doing against competitors, and how well results are improving within their own organizations. To benchmark your organization’s advertising and marketing campaigns, you’ll need to look at the tools and processes of other companies of a similar size within your industry, or industries like yours.

Importance of Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important for understanding how quickly your company is growing and if there are things you can do to improve conversions or growth — otherwise, you’re just tossing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks.

It’s also important to analyze how well you’re doing against competitors. You may want to benchmark your practices against their tools, processes, AI adoption, content, and marketing channels. While marketers may not focus on areas outside their expertise, in general, companies also want to benchmark factors like employee salaries and benefits to stay competitive and attract the best talent.

Benchmarking Benefits and Challenges

Companies who practice benchmarking diligently and effectively will find many advantages. It gives marketers performance-based goals to strive for, whether that’s open rates, clicks, or conversions. Some of the challenges involve a lack of access to real-time, reliable data, especially if you’re looking to benchmark against competitors rather than comparing your own campaigns.

Channel-Specific Benchmarking

Marketers can adopt benchmarking best practices within various channels or across omni-channel campaigns. Let’s look at some specific benchmarks in various channels.

Email Marketing

Some of the benchmarks to look at in email marketing include open rate and click-through rate (CTR). It’s also worth looking at your unsubscribes, but don’t stress over them, as unsubscribes can help boost your open percentage, which is a good thing. If they don’t like what you’re offering, and they let you know by opting out, they aren’t your ideal customer. In the words of Mel Robbins, “Let them.”

Overall, you want to see solid growth in your engaged subscriber list to achieve the most benefits from your campaigns. Email marketing services like Mailchimp provide benchmarks for others in your industry, which is a helpful tool for you to compare your campaigns against others in real time.

Social Media

Social media benchmarking involves looking at the specific platforms you’re on, your numbers of engaged followers, and other KPIs important to your company. These may include likes, views, clicks, comments, and shares. You can also gauge overall market sentiment toward your brand and its content, your voice share in the market compared to competitors, and if you’re engaged in social selling, actual sales that come through social platforms.

Paid Ads

Paid ads include cost-per-click (CPC) and cost per impression (CPM) models. Ads can include display ads, paid search, paid social, boosted posts, and native advertising, where ads blend into the content and platform where they appear.

A key analytic in paid ads is your return on investment (ROI). How much are you spending for each new customer or each sale? With performance marketing campaigns, e.g., you only pay for conversions, which boosts your ROI.

SEO and Content

In the ever-changing world of SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), benchmarks for content optimization are shifting as fast as ChatGPT can hurl clichés and obsequious compliments at users. Some tried-and-true benchmarks for SEO include:

• Google rankings.
• Google local rankings.
• Domain authority.
• Linkbacks.
• Click-through rate.
• Featured snippets.

As AI has become a major player in search, you also want to appear in AI summaries and in recommendations from generative AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT.

The real magic, though, still happens when users get to your website. This task has grown harder to accomplish, since people are finding all they need in AI summaries without clicking through to the primary source. Benchmarking KPIs like organic traffic, bounce rate, site load time, and conversions can help you improve the ROI that comes from website visitors.

How to Benchmark in Marketing Initiatives

Define Your Objectives

Benchmarking begins with the broad picture of defining your objectives. These aren’t KPIs: Objectives and goals describe, in plain language, what you want to accomplish. This might involve statements like “grow our social audience by 20% within six months,” “increase engagement on Facebook,” or “increase online sales by 20%.” You might also aim to grow your audience of prospects in the consideration or buying stage of the sales funnel, as these efforts often yield the highest ROI.

Establish Your KPIs

Your objectives show what you want to accomplish, while KPIs are the measurements you use to determine if you’ve achieved your goals. KPIs might include followers, shares, comments, or conversions.

Find Tools That Offer Accurate Analytics

Finally, you’ll need a way to measure your KPIs. Look for platforms that provide real-time analytics as well as competitor benchmarks.

Optimize Your Budget

Once you have benchmarks in place, optimize your budget to achieve them.

Advertisers’ Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking involves looking at what similar companies in your industry are doing and finding gaps and opportunities in your own processes and tools. While analytics such as CTR can be useful, competitive benchmarking is more about an overall evaluation of how your competitors got where they are — and whether you’re ahead of them, or falling behind.

This involves comparing not just analytics, but processes. For instance, a 2025 study from Pipedrive found that roughly one in five sales teams are using AI to analyze data to identify sales patterns (23%) and identify new leads (22%). Meanwhile, 19% of marketing teams are using AI for ad optimization and 8% are using it for programmatic advertising. These aren’t substantial numbers (yet), which means adopting AI tools for advertising can put you ahead of the curve if you act quickly.

Examples of Benchmarking

Benchmarking comes in many forms. You might start with the area where your company needs the most help, or has the most to gain, but ultimately, you’ll want to pursue benchmarking in each of these areas for the best results.

Strategic Benchmarking

Strategic benchmarking looks at where your brand is, where it’s going, and the broad-stroke path you’ll take to get there. Many businesses also look at strategic benchmarking as a comparison of your overall processes against top competitors. You’ll want to analyze their business strategy against yours and see where yours may have gaps.

Don’t have the time or the marketing team for a full strategic benchmarking project? Chron recommends a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis as a quick way to identify strategic benchmarks against competitors.

Internal Benchmarking

Internal benchmarking involves comparing where you were to where you are now, based on analytics. You can look at individual benchmarks, including SEO, social, content, and advertising, or take a more holistic view of how your overall content strategy is driving the paid and organic results you want.

Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking can be either strategic or granular. It involves looking at how you’re performing compared to competitors. Choosing the right competitors — companies of a similar size with a similar target audience and goals — is often the hardest, yet most important, aspect of competitive benchmarking.

Aligning Benchmarking With Business Goals

Analyzing statistics is great, but you have to make sure that the analytics you’re tracking align with your business goals, whether that’s increased brand visibility or sales.

Identify KPIs

When everyone in your organization knows the KPIs, they can work toward a unified direction, allocate resources effectively, and — perhaps most importantly — know when they’ve achieved success.

Focus on the Bottom of the Funnel

When it comes to advertising, focusing your target audience on those in the consideration stage can boost your ROI. Performance marketing targets those ready to make a buying decision. At that point, your KPI becomes all about conversions, purchases, or subscriptions, not visibility or brand sentiment. Those bottom-of-the-funnel decisions move the needle for your company’s success.

How to Use Google Analytics for Benchmarking

Google Analytics can be a powerful and easy-to-use tool for benchmarking. Google’s GA4 features let you compare data that’s refreshed daily, so you know you’re seeing competitive benchmarks in almost-real-time. Here are the steps to take to use GA4 for custom analytics:

Setting up GA4

If you haven’t already set up benchmarking in GA4, you’ll need to set your company size and industry preference. This ensures Google is benchmarking your data against similar companies for more accurate, relevant results. Then, enable the “modeling contributions and business insights” in the GA4 admin panel under “account settings.”

When you view the overview card, you’ll see a trendline for each metric. Select the benchmarking category and the metric: acquisition, engagement, retention, or monetization.

Is GA4 Secure?

Benchmarking data is encrypted in an aggregated format, allowing you a broad view of your competitors while your data also remains secure and anonymous.

Reporting and Presenting Benchmarks

Benchmarks are helpful tools, but only if the decision makers in your company can clearly understand what to do with the information. Here are some best practices for reporting and presenting benchmarks.

Be Clear: Once you’ve gathered the information, drill down on the data, analytics, and conclusions that are most important — the factors that will drive decisions and results. Be as clear and as concise as possible.

Use Visualizations: Many marketers find visualizations like graphs and charts helpful when presenting benchmarking data.

Tell Stories: Once you’ve shared the facts and figures, share anecdotes and stories to bring conclusions to life.

Offer Takeaways: Finally, share an action plan to achieve goals based on benchmarks, whether they’re internal or competitors. Seek out resources that will help, including using all the features in your marketing software or advertising platforms to help you achieve the ROI you want.

Key Takeaways

Benchmarking is crucial for staying ahead of competitors. Understanding what your competitors are doing on a broad level, as well as digging deep into analytics, can help you understand the best tools to deploy and to measure your results against similar companies. Benchmarking against your own results is also useful for adjusting your marketing tactics and improving your ROI.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What’s a good conversion rate for B2B landing pages?

Conversion rates vary widely based on the industry, size of the company, and the landing page optimization tools you use. It also varies based on the type of conversion: For instance, it’s easier to get someone to opt in for a free webinar than to make a purchase. That said, a conversion rate of 10% is commonly accepted as “good.”

What is the average customer acquisition cost (CAC) in SaaS?

The customer acquisition cost is your total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of customers. The average CAC in SaaS varies by industry and company size, and ranges from $91 in telecommunications to $14,772 in fintech.

What is a good ROAS for e-commerce?

A ROAS of 4:1, or $4 earned for every dollar spent, is considered a good benchmark for e-commerce companies, but 2:1 is often considered the average.