Modern Insider – Online Marketing Blog

Overview analytics provide a great number of insights into everything from successful marketing tactics to sticking points but when you include even the most basic segmenting opens up a whole new world  full of truly valuable information.

Segmenting is the process of including a variable that defines one visitor versus another. In a simple form this could mean a visitor who came from a specific campaign, who logged in to an account, or who was a customer. More advanced segmenting may pull in other data sources, demographics, last activity, purchase history, even model based forecasting of a customer’s long term value but in this post we’ll focus on the basics as even they offer a tremendous amount of value. For example let’s say you segmented your paid search report and discovered that a large number of visitors were current customers. Without this simple insight your campaigns may have looked like they were producing amazing engagement but little ROI – with it you understand why.

While segmenting is something often thought of as only for big businesses with enterprise analytics that’s no longer the case. In fact, Google Analytics has made it possible to segment with just a couple of clicks using both canned metrics as well as your own custom criteria. Because Google Analytics offers a custom metric to include in your reporting you can segment on any piece of data that your website has available – from the user’s job choice to their customer status – all that matters is that you have a way to know the answer either from something they do or your web database.

Once you decide what variable you want to include for segmenting (remember, it’s anything from your website) it’s just a matter of tagging it into your site. To do this you’ll need to alter your pages to include the following javascript code (for more instructions see this Google Analytics blog post):

<script type=”text/javascript”>pageTracker._setVar(’New Customer’);</script>

Simply change ‘New Customer’ to the value you want to track and Google Analytics will pick it up.

Once you’re tracking your variable you’ll want to build a segment around it. To do this follow this quick steps:

1 – From your Google Analytics reporting interface click on Advanced Segments and then + Create new custom segment.

2 – Start building your segment by selecting the Visitors drop down. Find “user defined value” and drag it over into the box to your left.

3- You can then customize which values are used in your report and what type of matching criteria is used. You are allowed to use and/or combinations so as the example below shows, you can check if the custom value matches one or more results.

4 – If there are other out of the box criteria you wish to include into your segment simply drag that over into an and/or box. For example, you may want to only look at paid traffic that matches your custom criteria or traffic from a certain country.

5 – Before you create your segment clicking the “Test Segment” button will allow you to see if anyone actually fits the profile showing you the number of visitors who meet each of the criteria steps you’ve identified.

6 – Once you’ve built your segment rules give it a name and save it.

Now that you have a segment setup you can apply it throughout your reporting tools to understand what just that group does or does not do; simply look for the Advanced Segments or Visitors tab at the top of a report.

Here’s an example of a conversion report looking at the default segments “All Visitors “ and “Returning  Visitors”. As you can see these canned segments already tell a lot — Conversion rates for all visitors on average over 2x those of repeat visitors for this content site which makes sense given that people can only convert once.

If I then apply my custom segment “guest visitors” you’ll see that conversion rates shoot 5x, which again makes perfect sense given the type of conversions for this site.

The beauty of custom segments is that you can create lots and lots of them to look at how all sorts of different combinations of user’s perform.  You don’t always have to use your custom metrics either;  variables like purchase history, goal conversions, pageviews, previous visits and even minute details like the tax paid can all be used to segment your reports. The more finite of areas you break things down into the more apparent differences become – just looking at the typical shipping charges customers pay over a year span can show you amazing details like when expedited shipping becomes most used and when free shipping is more popular.

Unfortunately there are some limitations with Google Analytics both in what you can segment (not every report is available) and with how much custom data you can gather. While most enterprise tools offer the ability to track upwards of 50 variables, Google Analytics gives you just one. Some people have found ways to extend this putting multiple data fields into their variable as explained in this post but that’s still very limited. There’s also a fundamental limit with having to manually build a segment and then see a report as it consumes a great deal of time to keep adding reports.

If you’re looking to extend your reporting with more variables and more reports consider an enterprise tool like Omniture, Webtrends or CoreMetrics. For advanced and on-the-fly segment analysis a tool like Discover really gives you a lot of power in understanding your data.