Successful businesses rely on data to inform their strategies, and between traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics, there are many critical areas to monitor. With an estimated 2.1 million ecommerce retailers in the U.S. alone, measuring your brand’s marketing, advertising, and sales performance and continually optimizing your strategy has never been more critical.

However, looking at your own data will only provide one side of the story. An average of 4,000 pageviews might be your record for daily traffic, but if your direct competitor receives 6,000, you still have plenty of room to improve. If your team dedicates resources to monitoring your performance, you need to have an objective view and competitive benchmarking is a great way to determine how your results compare to your peers.

Many companies lose out on the true value of benchmarking by comparing against the wrong competitors or looking at irrelevant metrics. It might be tempting to look at Amazon’s UX to gain inspiration, but to understand where your business stands in the marketplace, you need to compare yourself to the most relevant brands. Another common hurdle for benchmarking in ecommerce is not digging in deep enough to uncover the opportunities with the highest growth potential.

To help ecommerce businesses make the most of their benchmark analysis, we created a guide, How to Use Benchmarking for a Competitive Advantage. This guide will walk you through the process of competitive benchmarking and teach you:

1. What benchmarking is and why it’s important.
2. How to identify your most relevant competitors.
3. Ecommerce benchmark metrics to compare.
4. Six streamlined steps to efficient benchmarking.
5. Tips on how to use your insights to create SMART goals.

Download our free guide to learn the basics of benchmarking and how you can leverage it to identify where your company is succeeding and where you need to improve to stay competitive.