Question

Statistical analyses bear little meaning when they are not put in context. Having a conversion rate of 7% does not tell you much about the success of an online platform if you have nothing to compare it to. This is why setting well-informed and realistic KPIs is essential to the monitoring of a company’s success, and why industry benchmarks are used to gauge the success of an organisation in relation to competing organisations. However, finding the appropriate benchmarks specific to your business role and industry may not always be as straightforward as it seems.

Alan Coleman is a digital marketer who works with marketing data derived from sites like Google Analytics on a daily basis, and in this blog post, he discusses the significance of finally having e-commerce benchmarks. He talks about the positive impact that benchmarking information, and thus the ability to add context to his analyses, has had on his data reporting.

Share your view on the importance of benchmarks within your industry or business area of interest, and discuss the different benchmarks used within your field. If you are unsure of industry benchmarks that relate to the work that you do, try to look up these benchmarks and share what you learn with your fellow classmates. Were these statistics easy to find? Do you think they are relevant in your context when it comes to interpreting data?

Answer 1

According to Me Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost.......*

Benchmarking is used to measure performance using a specific indicator (cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure) resulting in a metric of performance that is then compared to others.

Also referred to as "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking", this process is used in management in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best-practice companies' processes, usually within a peer group defined for the purposes of comparison. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to improve their practices.

In project management benchmarking can also support the selection, planning and delivery of projects.

In the process of best practice benchmarking, management identifies the best firms in their industry, or in another industry where similar processes exist, and compares the results and processes of those studied (the "targets") to one's own results and processes. In this way, they learn how well the targets perform and, more importantly, the business processes that explain why these firms are successful. According to National Council on Measurement in Education, benchmark assessments

^​​​ are short assessments used by teachers at various times throughout the school year to monitor student progress in some area of the school curriculum. These also are known as interim assessments.....

Overall data interpretation is much important in this concept....