Google Analytics Adds Campaign Benchmarking Tools

Google has rolled out a fresh layer of campaign intelligence within Google Analytics, giving advertisers a way to measure their performance against anonymized industry norms. The new capability, housed inside the Ask Advisor tool, lets users pose straightforward questions about their standing and receive comparative data in return.

Josh Moser, Senior Director of Product Management, detailed the update in a company blog post, positioning it alongside a broader set of enhancements spanning both Google Ads and Google Analytics.

How The Comparison Works

The feature draws on anonymized averages pulled from businesses with similar profiles. It operates through Ask Advisor, the cross-platform assistant Google first showcased at Google Marketing Live back in May. That agent is designed to function across Google Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and Google Marketing Platform. Google currently labels Ask Advisor as a beta offering, available to English-language accounts.

Users can type a natural language query, such as asking how their campaigns are trending, and the system responds with a benchmark comparison.

Peer Group Mechanics

According to Google’s support documentation, the benchmarking function reports the median along with the 25th and 75th percentiles for a defined peer set. That set is drawn from businesses in your industry category and appears across the Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention reports, as well as the Home page overview.

To access this data, your property must have Modeling contributions & business insights enabled under Admin settings. The peer group itself is built from the industry category selected during property setup, supplemented by signals derived from your URLs and app attributes.

You retain some control over that comparison set. Google offers 25 top-level industry categories, each with subcategories that drill down to specific niches like athletic shoes.

What remains unclear is whether the Ask Advisor benchmark relies on that same configurable peer group or constructs its own. The announcement also does not clarify whether the Modeling contributions setting gates this new feature the way it does for existing benchmarking reports.

Why Your Peer Group Matters

A benchmark only carries weight when the comparison set resembles your own business. Since Analytics constructs your peer group from the industry category assigned at property creation, it is worth verifying that category in Admin before relying on the numbers. Unlike Google’s Merchant Center reporting, which offers no such control, Analytics gives you the ability to adjust this setting.

Other Announcements In The Update

Google Analytics is also introducing what the company calls AI Overviews at the top of the page. These are not the same AI Overviews found in Search results. Instead, they summarize what has shifted in your data since your previous login. You can choose to receive these summaries via phone or email notifications, with control over how frequently they arrive.

Beyond that, Google Ads is gaining personalized insights cards tailored to your business, along with a new Dashboards feature that generates charts from text prompts. That Dashboards capability is slated to come to Google Analytics as well, though no timeline has been provided. Both the Ads insights cards and Dashboards are currently in beta for English-language accounts.

What To Expect Next

Google has not specified a rollout date for the benchmarking feature. When it does arrive, anticipate seeing a range rather than a single figure, as the reports present a median with a distribution around it.