Benchmark

A point of comparison that tells you whether a number is good. Without one, every result is just a number with a mood.

A number alone has a mood, not a meaning. Four percent conversion is triumph or crisis depending entirely on the shelf, the price and the traffic's source. The benchmark supplies the sentence around the number: against last quarter, against the category, against what this cost.

Choose comparisons that share your conditions, or the benchmark flatters and misleads; a boutique studio measured against platform averages learns nothing either way. And benchmark the trend, not the snapshot. Direction against your own history is the one comparison that is always fair and always available.