A benchmark is a comparison of your own results with a reference value. Companies reach for industry averages, which tend to be misleading, however – they mix different company sizes, markets, price levels and measurement methods, so they do not tell you whether your figure is good. An internal comparison is far more useful: your own baseline value before a change, the same period last year, comparison between segments and between channels. Use an industry figure at most for rough orientation, and always check how it was measured. If you are comparing year on year, take into account changes in measurement, in the offering and in seasonality; otherwise you are comparing two different things, and the conclusion is wrong regardless of how precise the figures themselves are.
Source: slovak.statistics.sk
See also: Data quality in analytics, Seasonality of demand, KPIs for a marketer.
