How do I know? A fascinating report on new radio ratings systems shows that when people self-report their classical music listening habits, they inflate their estimate by that margin—probably to give the impression that they’re smarter.

The discrepancy revealed itself when radio surveys were switched from paper-based diaries to more accurate pager-like “people meters.”

Classical music listening went down. Soft-rock listening by men went up—by 16%.

The takeaway? Don’t trust what people say. Trust what they do.

Objective data shows that interest in analytics is gaining on interest in surveys

This is particularly important with web marketing. With the ceaseless launch of new websites and technologies, it’s easy to get caught up in hype. And people don’t want to seem like they’re getting left behind.

Online video and social media marketing are some recent examples. People love to say they’re on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks, and using them extensively. But often they want to appear savvier than they are.

There’s a similar bias with market research and advertising focus groups. Often, ads that work well in the field perform poorly in testing—a phenomenon discovered in the early days of direct marketing. Why? Because people don’t want to admit how they would really respond to more direct pleas rather than those that are more artful.

So beware self-reported survey data. At the very least, temper them with objective analytics.

1. Apps: Anyone with an iPhone already knows it. But the appification of Facebook, Salesforce, Google and other web titans suggests there’s more to apps than handheld video games. In fact, Pincus believes (and he seems to have a knack for this web stuff) that the traditional web battlefields are wide open. Even search, he proposes, has no clear leader in the app space. So just because your business dominates the web doesn’t mean it will dominate web-connected apps.
2. Measurement: As a company focused on analytics and measurable results, we’re happy to hear about this—and we’ve noticed. As people increasingly turn to the web and apps for things they previously got elsewhere (like books and newspapers), the ability to measure their activity has become both more important and more possible. That’s why so many web analysts and marketers were excited by Google’s recent announcement of new mobile- and app-tracking features in Google Analytics. Such measurement enables rapid testing and optimization. And if your company’s not doing it, you will almost certainly get left behind by more savvy competitors.
3. Paid content: Could it really be? Are people finally willing to pay for web content? Well, yes and no. With over one billion downloads, the Apple app store reportedly makes $1 million a day in application sales. Traditional websites, however, still tend to fail at pay-wall experiments. So it appears that just because something uses data from the web doesn’t mean people treat it like a website. That’s of important note for your business, as it’s possible you can develop an app that people will actually pay for (like Kraft did). Why? I think there are a few reasons. First, people treat the web like public space, but treat their mobile devices like private space. They expect public space to be free but understand private space takes investment (they’ll buy patio furniture for their yard but not for their nearest park). Second, as internet access costs drop to nothing—and they will, facilitated by Google’s better-than-free operating system plans that will encourage companies to give away mobile devices and data access—people have more money to spend on digital content. There are many other factors, of course, but the bottom line is that consumers appear ready to pay for some digitally distributed content and web-enabled applications.

Call it what you will, but it’s clear these trends will impact your business.

And you should probably act now, because you can bet web 4.0 is on its way.

Knowing, for example, how many more (or fewer) visitors you’re getting. And how much longer (or shorter) people are engaging with your content.

If someone sent a brochure for that service, you would probably read every word. And maybe even sign a check.

Well, put your checkbook away. Because Google, quite quietly, has made this service available absolutely free with Google Analytics.

According to the official Google Analytics blog:

Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.

Sounds great, right?

Well, we decided to test it out.

And being quite thrilled with the results, we thought you might want to give it a go.

Interested? Here’s how:

Step one: Get started

First, you’ll need a Google Analytics account, which is completely free.

You’ll then need to set up your website profile. (Which is, obviously, beyond the scope of this post, but quite simple. You can find help on the Google Analytics site.)

Once you have that, log in and click the link that reads "Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings." It’s here:

Step two: Share your data (anonymously)

Benchmarking goes both ways. So, to see data, you need to share data.

Google affirms that the data is aggregated, anonymous and stripped of any identifiable features.

Here’s the box you need to click:

Step three: View reports

Once you’ve shared your data, click to view reports as you normally would. Just hit this link beside the appropriate profile on your start page:

Step four: View benchmarking

Once viewing reports for a particular profile, you can navigate to the benchmarking tab.

You’ll find this under the "Visitors" link in the left-hand navigation:

Step five: Choose industry

To see benchmarking data, you now have to select an industry.

To compare against competitors, choose your own industry. For a broader perspective, you can also compare against any industry.

Simply choose like this:

Step six: Compare statistics

Once you choose an industry, you can compare statistics.

And now the fun begins.

You can see how well your site stacks up against the competition in such areas as unique visitors, page views, bounce rates and average time on your site.

For example, according to the benchmarking service, visits to this website compared to other marketing service industry websites looks like this for March (ours is blue, theirs is gray):

Of course, there are caveats.

The data depends on which sites are using and opting in to Google Analytics.

But with features such as benchmarking at no cost, the number of such sites should only go up.

So, is Google Analytics benchmarking in your site’s future?