Benchmark

A benchmark is a reference figure, taken from an industry report, a competitor set or the product's own past, used to judge whether a current number is good.

There are three kinds of reference: external figures from industry reports, competitive figures from market data, and internal figures from the product's own past. External numbers rarely transfer, because each tool defines the metric differently, traffic mix and season and market differ, and the sample behind a published report is usually made of companies unlike the reader's. The one case with an official published threshold is Google's Core Web Vitals limits and the 75th-percentile rule. The most useful reference is the same product in the previous period, measured with the same definition, the same filters and the same seasonality.