TLDR: Benchmarking is a simple way to see where your business sits against competitors. It saves time, it can save money on paid tools you don’t need to subscribe to separately, and it’sespecially valuable if you don’t have a dedicated analyst on your team. This blog covers what benchmarking actually is, why it’s useful for ecommerce and B2B businesses alike, how to set it up.
What is benchmarking?
At its simplest, benchmarking is a tool that helps a business owner or marketer understand how their domain compares to other domains in their space.
If you’ve got a group of competitors you want to keep an eye on, but not the time or manpower to track them manually, benchmarking gives you a click-of-a-button view. You can see how your competitors are growing relative to you, whether you’re outperforming them or they’re outperforming you, and get that top-level read without building a report from scratch.
Why is benchmarking useful for businesses?
Benchmarking is just as useful for ecommerce businesses as it is for B2B. The core benefit in both cases comes down to time.
Doing this manually means pulling data from a range of platforms, most of which are paid, and piecing it together yourself. Benchmarking tools do that for you, which means you’re not spending hours replicating something a platform can already do. Instead of building that picture yourself, you can check a screen once a month and see where you stand.
There’s a cost angle too. Proper competitor tracking often means paying for three or four separate platforms. If you don’t already have access to those tools, a benchmarking feature can remove that cost entirely. That makes it particularly valuable for smaller businesses that don’t have the budget or resources to run several subscriptions just to keep an eye on the competition. It’s a genuinely inexpensive way to stay informed.
Types of business benchmarking
Benchmarking as a concept can apply to different parts of a business. Financial benchmarking looks at metrics like revenue or margin against industry norms. Marketing benchmarking compares campaign performance against category standards. Ecommerce benchmarking looks at metrics like conversion rate or average order value against similar stores.
Where ASK BOSCO® focuses is competitor benchmarking comparing your domain’s performance directly against a set of named competitors.
That comparison covers your SEO and paid performance angle, alongside your broader industry standing. Performance is really just the visible impact of strategy, so tracking it side by side with named competitors tells you a lot about where your strategy is working and where it isn’t.
It’s worth remembering that spend and performance don’t automatically match up. Two brands in the same category, spending roughly the same amount, can see very different results because of brand recognition. Think Amazon compared and independent shop: outside a handful of loyal customers, Amazon tends to be the brand people reach for first, and that recognition shapes results in a way spend alone doesn’t explain. Competitor benchmarking won’t do that analysis for you, but it will show you the trend, and what you take from that trend is up to you.
How to benchmark your business: Step-by-step
Setting up benchmarking in ASK BOSCO® is deliberately simple.
- Step 1: Log in to the platform. Benchmarking is available as soon as you’re signed in, no separate setup required.
- Step 2: Go to the benchmarking tab. You’ll find it in your main navigation.
- Step 3: Review your comparison list. ASK BOSCO® generates a starting list of competitors we think is reasonable for your business.
- Step 4: Update your compared businesses if needed. If the default list doesn’t reflect who you actually see as competition, you can change it to match your own perceived competitive set.
That’s genuinely all there is to it. Once your compares are set, the ongoing work is done for you.
Common challenges when benchmarking a business
There isn’t really a way to get benchmarking “wrong.” It’s largely down to the user and the choices they make about who to compare against. Comparing a local artist to Van Gogh, for example, is unlikely to give you a useful read, even if some businesses are tempted to do it that way anyway.
The most common challenge is an oversight: keeping your comparison list up to date. If your business has grown from a small company into a mid-size ecommerce platform, your list of comparisons should grow with it. Businesses that don’t revisit their comparison set end up benchmarking against a peer group that no longer reflects where they actually sit, whether that’s still comparing against smaller niche vendors after outgrowing them, or the reverse.
How ASK BOSCO® makes benchmarking effortless
ASK BOSCO® handles the entire process for you: the data gathering, the cleaning, and the calculations you’d otherwise have to do by hand, at scale.
Without a platform like ASK BOSCO®, benchmarking manually means going into a tool like Similarweb, selecting the domains, saving that data out to a spreadsheet, and repeating that process for every competitor. Then comes the harder part: running the calculations needed to understand how you’re performing across the full landscape, not just one narrow area.
Turning that into a meaningful, connected story is genuinely difficult. You’re often comparing numbers operating at wildly different scales, some in the tens, others in the thousands or millions, depending on whether you’re looking at impressions, clicks, or another metric entirely. On top of that, channels like SEO and PPC behave so differently that comparing them side by side in a way that actually makes sense is its own challenge.
ASK BOSCO® does all of that for you, automatically, so you get a clear, connected view of where you stand instead of a spreadsheet full of numbers you have to make sense of yourself.
