Rights: reading the analysis requires access to the Google My Business survey, and covers the stores in your scope. Mapping the competitors requires an administrator.
Location: the External Benchmark page, under Responses on the Google My Business survey
Setup: at least one of your stores mapped to a competitor store, which an administrator does beforehand.
Overview
You cannot survey someone who walked into a competitor's store, so the comparison a store manager wants most is usually the one nobody holds data on. External Benchmark closes that gap with public Google reviews: it reads the reviews left on your stores and on the competitor stores mapped to them, passes them through the same tagging as your own verbatims, and turns them into a like-for-like comparison. Reviews are collected once a day, so the analysis reflects the state of play as of yesterday.
Read the analysis
- Open the analysis. On the Google My Business survey, in the left menu under Responses, click External Benchmark.
- Set the period and the scope. The period picker offers General, Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Pick a month, Pick a year and Pick a custom range, and the filters narrow the analysis by Zone, Country, Store and Store code. A brand with no review over the period you selected does not appear in the comparison at all, which is worth keeping in mind before concluding that a competitor has disappeared.
- Read the overall comparison. At the top, one card per brand shows its overall Google rating out of 5 and its number of reviews in brackets. Your own brand card is highlighted.
- Read the ranking aspect by aspect. Each card below covers one aspect, such as waiting time or welcome greeting, and shows Your score next to a STANDINGS list ranking every brand on that aspect, each with its score and its review count. A
Leader,Runner-uporLastbadge marks your rank when you hold the first, the second or the worst position, and no badge appears for the ranks in between. On a narrow scope with very few reviews, an aspect shows-/5and your brand is absent from that aspect's standings.
- Drill into the score details. The Score details table starts at worldwide and expands to zone, then country, then individual store, for every brand. A dash in a cell means there is no data for that combination.
- Compare store by store. The last section lists each of your stores with its rating, its review count and an Outperforming X/Y indicator, where X is the number of competitor stores rated below yours out of the Y compared. Under each store, the matched competitor stores appear with their own rating, review count and a link to Google Maps.
[📸 Screenshot to add, source: to capture live in product, interface: EN, caption: illustrates step 1, the left menu of the Google My Business survey with External Benchmark under Responses, cropped to the menu]
[📸 Screenshot to add, source: to capture live in product, interface: EN, caption: illustrates step 4, two aspect cards side by side, one showing a Leader badge and one showing a Last badge, with the STANDINGS list visible, cropped to the two cards]
What this feature does not do
- The analysis reads Google My Business reviews only. Reviews left on other platforms are not part of the comparison, and neither are your survey responses.
- You do not manage the list of competitor brands yourself. Send the brands you want to track to your CSM, who sets them up for your company.
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This document is for information and illustrative purposes only. It does not represent any contractual engagement and is subject to change for the purpose of service improvements.