Littledata launched benchmarks for websites two years ago. They quickly became a key feature of our app, and as customers became more engaged, so did ideas for how to improve our benchmarking and the algorithms that learn from those benchmarks.
In response to customer feedback and deeper research into industry sectors, we’ve made some really exciting improvements over the last few months to make the comparisons even more useful — and even more dynamic.
The changes are five-fold.
- Detailed sectors and sub-sectors. Almost every customer we talked to said the benchmark comparison was most useful if it was for very similar sites. Previously we only had 50 high-level sectors to compare with; now we have hundreds of low-level sectors. You can visualise the full range.
- Smarter auto-categorisation of your website. Our machine learning process now has a 95% chance of finding the best sector for your website, meaning you can compare against the most useful benchmark without filling in a single form!
- Ability to manually change industry sector. And of course, if you’re in that 5% that needs human input, then you (or your Enterprise account manager) can pick a better sector in the general app settings page. You might also want to change sectors just to see how you compare. No problem.
- Benchmarks for technology stacks. Want to see if you are making the most of a technology such as Shopify or Yieldify? Now you can compare with other sites using the same technology, making our ecommerce benchmarking even more powerful for agencies and web developers.
- Benchmarks for starter websites. Previously we only generated benchmarks for sites with at least 500 monthly visits. We dropped that to 200 monthly visits, so starter websites can see a comparison – and see more detail as they grow.
We’ve launched a live visualisation of how our AI-based website categorizer is mapping a range of industry sectors. It offers a full overview of website categories and segments.
And you can drill down to see more details. For example, we’ve seen a big rise in wine, coffee and health shake retailers this year, many of whom are using our ReCharge integration to get insight into their subscription business models.
As our algorithms learn about ecommerce businesses selling beverages of many varieties and automatically categorises sites accordingly, you can now look closely at a particular segment to see how your site compares.
Littledata is an Agile company. We’re constantly iterating, and continuously improving the benchmarks to make them more actionable, so please give us feedback if you’d like to see more.
Happy benchmarking!
