Performance Benchmarking

What is benchmarking?

Benchmarking is about measuring a company’s performance. Whether it’s for your products, services or processes, measuring these against a company that is considered to be an industry leader can be an insightful tool.

The aim of benchmarking is to identify internal opportunities for improvement that can then be implemented in your company. This can include improving things like your page loading speed, producing higher quality content, improving your UX design, technical SEO, and more.

Internal vs external benchmarking

There are two fundamental types of benchmarking: external and internal.

External benchmarking involves comparing your company with external organisations, either from within the industry they operate in or with practices from other industries entirely.

Internal benchmarking compares departments or practices within an organisation, looking at the divisions or sites of a business that are doing well to determine what makes them more successful. From this, you can then set a level of performance metric to work towards.

A person is taking a leap from one rock to another with a backpack

What other types of benchmarking are there?

An icon of a magnifying glass with a girl's image in between

Competitive benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking is a form of external benchmarking that focuses on comparing your processes with direct competitors. This allows you to identify exactly why a competitor is succeeding and what is driving customer satisfaction in your industry.

An arrow is going up on some bar graphs

Performance benchmarking

Performance benchmarking tracks business performance. By looking at metrics and KPIs within a business, it’s possible to compare past performance outcomes to current standards. This means that standards are able to improve over time and new benchmarks can be established.

An icon of benchmarking services

Strategic benchmarking

Strategic benchmarking is a form of external benchmarking that specifically analyses the strategies that other companies have used to be successful. Benchmarking how you strategise to be successful can help you build new strategies, and is particularly useful for start-ups and new businesses.

A gear icon is revolving in a person's brain

Practice benchmarking

Practice benchmarking is a form of internal benchmarking that addresses the practices and processes of your business. This means that you need to have data-gathering procedures in place, such as how employees and teams are using their time or completing tasks. By mapping processes, you can identify performance gaps in the company.

Why is Benchmarking Important?

1. It increases effectiveness and efficiency

Considering the way that your competitors operate — notably the ones who are most efficient and successful — gives you the opportunity to analyse what makes them work well, how your industry is operating, and how you can perform better.

2. It helps you set clear business goals

Regular benchmarks and benchmark services allow you to set clear, consistent goals for your company. If you can define success and identify clear goals, you’re better able to develop strategies to meet your goals within a certain period of time while also being able to review progress as you go.

3. It provides new opportunities for discovery

Benchmarking allows you to find new opportunities for success and growth. By identifying opportunities in areas that other organisations are succeeding in, you can find new ways to create business for the company. This is particularly useful if your organisation is moving too slowly or not progressing effectively.

4. It increases sales performance

Benchmarking allows you to assess your sales figures and compare them to other successful organisations. While strong sales do increase an organisation’s success, not having the appropriate insights about the sales can be a barrier to enhancing sales performance.

5. It helps you understand your organisation and motivate your employees

A benchmarking report gives employees insight into how they fit in to an organisation, which is motivating and encourages them to fully embrace the workplace culture, while departments are strengthened by working together as a unit.

6. It can help you better understand your competition

Benchmarking naturally allows you to gain a better overall understanding of your competition. If you understand how they operate, you can create strategies that rival theirs, and drive your own operations to match or outpace their success.

7. It can improve the quality of your product

Using benchmarking to look at your competitors’ products allows you to see what may be different or more progressive than your own. Identifying this allows you to improve on the quality of your own products and services, and build customer satisfaction into the design.

By establishing benchmarking quality standards, you’re able to ensure support and training for employees who aren’t currently meeting these standards.

Similarly, as operational processes are continually evaluated, having a benchmarking system embedded into the organisation means that standards can easily and routinely be reviewed and updated.

Our holistic approach

At PIO, we take a holistic approach in our benchmarking audit and look at all areas of your online presence. We divide the process into four categories: Performance, Technical, Content and Creative. Each category has a 25% weighting.

The Performance and Technical categories form the foundation of the benchmark audit. Every pound spent on content, creative, PR, social and video is predicated on these, so it’s critical to get them right.

Icon of a graph representing the site performance part of benchmarking SEO service

Performance quadrant

This looks at your site goals and how you are performing against them. Key indicators includes:

  • User signals
  • Backlink performance
  • Landing page metrics
  • Audience behaviour

Technical quadrant

This assesses whether the technical foundations of your site are in place to drive performance. Key indicators include:

  • Core SEO settings
  • Page experience signals
  • On-page signals
  • Indexing signals
Icon of a wrench and screwdriver representing the technical part of benchmarking SEO service
Icon of a wrench and screwdriver representing the technical part of benchmarking SEO service

Technical quadrant

This assesses whether the technical foundations of your site are in place to drive performance. Key indicators include:

  • Core SEO settings
  • Page experience signals
  • On-page signals
  • Indexing signals

Finally, the Content and Creative quadrants are defined, and these work hand-in-hand to bring a more human touch to your online performance.

Icon of website elements representing the content part of benchmarking SEO service

Content quadrant

This offers a data-driven performance review of your site’s content and copy to determine whether they are based on empirical insights, if they compete on Google, and convert users to your business goals. Key indicators include:

  • On-page tags
  • Content outputs
  • Search results
  • Content opportunities

Creative performance quadrant

This assesses whether your SEO copy and UX design elements help achieve top rankings, positive user experience, and good conversions, bringing you closer towards your overall business and content goals. Key indicators include:

  • Copy performance
  • Design performance
  • Video performance
  • Social performance
Icon of two pencils representing a creative approach to benchmarking SEO service
Icon of two pencils representing a creative approach to benchmarking SEO service

Creative performance quadrant

This assesses whether your SEO copy and UX design elements help achieve top rankings, positive user experience, and good conversions, bringing you closer towards your overall business and content goals. Key indicators include:

  • Copy performance
  • Design performance
  • Video performance
  • Social performance

Visualising results with the PIOneer benchmark radar chart

Our benchmarking process matches your performance results against similar organisations. Data is collated from multiple stress points in your business and aggregated to provide insights comparable to competitor brands.

The variance between the two results is represented on our two-dimensional PIOneer benchmark radar chart, using ranking scales on each axis of the diagram.

The industry benchmark is based on hundreds of pharma projects and industry data. With this, you can quickly determine how well you’re performing against your competition.

Using this tool, you can:

  • Gain an independent perspective on how your business performs compared to others
  • Drill down into performance gaps to identify areas for improvement and new opportunities
  • Encourage a culture and mindset of continuous measurement and improvement
  • Quickly spot data outliers and areas for improvement

Why benchmark with PIO?

A small icon of bar graphs

First Market Mover

PIO works with 80% of the top pharma companies across global markets and has experience on thousands of marketing campaigns and many therapy areas

An icon of some statistics and an arrow

Patient-centricity

PIO helps pharma companies focus on their patients and the user journey by providing insights and support to access the 93% of people that start their search for information with a search engine.

A small icon of an upwards arrow

Results

PIO wins in the the organic space for our clients, helping its clients build trust and credibility, deliver increased sales and conversions, and form new customer engagements

performance-io's logo in white

Get in Touch

Get your 30 minute consultation

If you have any questions about us, or want to reach us, please do not hesitate to contact us or send us an email.
hello@performancei.wpenginepowered.com

Array

The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.

Your message has been sent, thank you.

Let's redefine SEO & performance in healthcare

Book a
consultation

Subscribe to
newsletter

Subscribe to newsletter

Array

The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.

Our website uses cookies to ensure you to get the best experience on our website. Please accept of our Cookie Policy

Accept