This article explains what the Awareness benchmark report is, how to interpret it, and how to use it to identify which indicators need the most attention.
What is the Awareness benchmark?
The Awareness benchmark report compares the results of your organization's awareness program with those of other SMARTFENSE client organizations, both globally and within your own sector. It allows you to see at a glance how well each indicator is performing and where it is advisable to focus efforts to reduce the risk of human factors.
Scope and considerations
- Indicators are calculated based on the entire history of the program for your active users, except for Average risk, which reflects the current status of each user.
- Recent users may take longer to reflect accurately: older campaigns and training continue to weigh in the total while those users remain active.
- The benchmark is anonymous and aggregated: the results of an individual organization are never exposed. If a sector does not meet a minimum number of organizations, the comparison falls to that of all sectors.
How to access the report
This report is available from the Standard plan onwards. It is not visible on lower plans.
- Log in to the platform with an administrator account.
- Go to Reports. Locate the Key Performance Indicators card and, within it, select Awareness benchmark.
- Select the sector you want to compare against in the All sectors dropdown, or leave it on that option to compare against the global set of organizations.
How to read each indicator
Each indicator shows four elements:
- Your organization's value: the program's own result.
- Qualitative band: measures the quality of the indicator against a fixed standard, the same for all organizations. Possible values are: Optimal, Acceptable, Needs improvement, and Poor.
- Position: indicates the percentage of organizations you outperform ("Outperforms X% of organizations"). This is a relative measure against your peers.
- Conclusion: a natural language summary of the situation: Optimal level, Good level, There is room for improvement, or Low level.
The band and the position may not match, and that is normal. An indicator can outperform most organizations and still not have reached the target level, or vice versa. Read both signals together: the band tells you how good it is; the position, how it compares.
The goal field indicates whether it is advisable for the number to be as high or as low as possible.
Program indicators
The Program indicators section shows a card for each indicator with its value, the band, the benchmark average, and a range showing where your organization stands within the distribution of the rest (central half, typical minimum and maximum).
The available indicators are:
- Drop rate: users who took the risky action on the received simulations.
- Reporting rate: users who reported the simulation among those who received it.
- Resilience index: reports per drop (balance between reporting culture and exposure).
- Completion rate: assigned training that was actually completed.
- Average risk: risk level of active users (scale 0–100; lower is better), based on their behavior towards simulations and training.
- Recidivism: users who dropped repeatedly.
- Program coverage: percentage of active users reached by the program.
Detail by component
The Detail by component section shows your step-by-step rates for each enabled component (interactive modules, videos, video games, newsletters, exams, surveys, phishing, ransomware, smishing, and USB Drop), compared against the average of other organizations.
Each table indicates which group it is being compared to: your organization's sector or all sectors. A component can be compared against all sectors even if its sector has a sample at the program level, if that particular component does not gather enough organizations in the sector.
To export the complete detail, click the Export CSV button. The file includes an Average Scope column that indicates, row by row, which group it was compared against.
💡 Best practices
- Use this report to prioritize: focus efforts on indicators with a "Needs improvement" or "Low level" band, and maintain those that are already at a good level.
- Compare against your own sector before comparing against all sectors, as risk patterns vary by industry.
- Review the report periodically after completing training or simulation cycles, to measure the impact of actions taken.
- Share results with the management team using the CSV export to support investment decisions in awareness.
- Keep in mind that recently added users may affect values until they accumulate enough program history.