Institutional Digital Performance & Benchmarking
Understand your university's digital position, benchmark performance against selected peers, and develop an evidence-based strategy for strengthening institutional web presence and research visibility.
Service overview
The Institutional Digital Performance Assessment is an optional advisory service offered through UNIRANKS, which operates the Webometrics project. It gives a university a structured, evidence-based view of how its institution is represented on the web and in scholarly communication, how it compares with selected peers, and which practical steps are most likely to strengthen its digital presence and research visibility.
Each assessment is prepared for one institution, compared with up to five peer institutions chosen with the university, and delivered as a confidential report with an executive summary, a management presentation and a consultation meeting to discuss the findings.
Who the service is for
- University leadership: presidents, vice-chancellors and their offices
- Ranking, strategy and institutional research offices
- IT, web and digital services
- Research offices, libraries and repository managers
- Communications and marketing departments
Value to universities
- A clear, evidence-based picture of the institution's current digital position, grounded in the webometric research behind Webometrics.org
- A like-for-like comparison with the peers that matter to the university
- Priorities that can be assigned to the right departments, with realistic effort and measurable indicators
- A shared basis for discussion between leadership, IT, research and communications teams
Key assessment areas
Institutional baseline
The university's published Webometrics results and their history, its official domains and web properties, and how discoverable it is today.
Digital visibility and web impact
External recognition and linking patterns, search visibility, website architecture, indexability and technical performance.
Research visibility
How easily research outputs, repositories, researcher identifiers and scholarly content can be found and attributed to the institution.
Evidence-based SWOT
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, each linked to the evidence collected during the assessment.
Competitive benchmarking
The university is compared with up to five peer institutions it selects with us, such as national competitors or aspirational peers abroad. The comparison uses the same evidence for every institution and shows where meaningful gaps and opportunities lie.
Strategic improvement roadmap
Findings are translated into prioritised recommendations and a 12-month roadmap: foundation work in months 1 to 3, development in months 4 to 6, expansion in months 7 to 9, and evaluation in months 10 to 12. Each recommendation states the expected institutional benefit, the responsible function, the effort involved and a measurable indicator of progress.
A private institutional report
The assessment is delivered as a confidential report prepared for the university. It is not published, and its findings are not shared with other institutions unless the university authorises it.
Optional implementation support and annual reassessment
Where a university would like help with specific recommendations, separately scoped implementation support can be proposed. An optional annual reassessment reviews progress against the roadmap, updates the benchmarking and sets priorities for the following year. Neither is required.
Independence of the rankings and limitations
- This is a commercial advisory service of UNIRANKS. It is separate from the production of the Webometrics rankings.
- Requesting or purchasing an assessment, implementation support or a reassessment does not influence ranking eligibility, inclusion, scores, positions or methodology. Ranking positions cannot be bought.
- No assessment guarantees a ranking improvement. Recommendations aim to strengthen an institution's digital presence; official results are calculated only under the published methodology.
- Factual correction requests are handled in the same way for every institution, whether or not it uses this service.
- Assessments use evidence that can be observed or that the university provides. Where data is unavailable or a measurement has limitations, the report says so.
See also the Webometrics methodology and the Editorial Standards & Publication Policy.
Request an Institutional Assessment
Tell us about your institution and what you would like the assessment to cover. We will reply by email to discuss scope, the peer institutions to include and the next steps. Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required.
The information you send is used only to respond to your request and is handled as described in our privacy notice for assessment requests. Requests are confidential.
