Google Analytics - Advanced Segments
Wednesday 10 March 2010
TAGS: Analytics | eCommerce
Analytics information can be crucial to knowing what’s going on with your website. Google’s own analytics suite is an excellent entry level package that every website owner should have. John Ryder offers his tips and advice for using some of Google Analytics more advanced features.
I can’t remember the last time I spoke to a prospective client that didn’t have Google Analytics installed on their site these days. Regardless of which industry or sector one operates in, it can offer excellent insight into your website and how your users interact with it.
In my opinion though, those that have access to the information are only scratching the surface and not accessing some of Google Analytics adept features. Here (and in future posts) I’m going to give some insight into them. This week, it’s the turn of…
Advanced Segments
Advanced segments provide the ability to do everything you normally do with Analytics, but with only on a small subset of data.
It’s useful on a number of levels. One example would be an eCommerce site that serves the UK and Republic of Ireland. Using Advanced Segments, you have the power to split information into two - data for your Irish visitors and data for your UK visitors. It can provide insight into how your UK visitors differ from your Irish visitors in terms of purchasing habits, website usage, searches and so on.
Perhaps more powerful is the ability to compare two or more different referrer sources by a number of metrics to see which provides better-quality traffic.
How to view Advanced Segments
We should quickly touch on viewing advanced segments in Google Analytics. Go to the dashboard (or any other report) and click on the ‘Advanced Segments’ tab just above the date range selector. It should be defaulted to ‘All Visits’ at the moment.
You’ll now see a selection of pre-defined advanced segments. These are the basic ones that Google provides. ‘All visits’ is already selected but add ‘New Visitors’ and ‘Returning Visitor’s.
‘Apply’ those settings to apply them to the report you’ve just been looking at. In my example you’ll see that the graph now charts traffic figures for new visitors and returning visitors separately.
The pre-defined options that Google provides are very useful but it’s possible to get into the real nitty-gritty of analytics by creating your own. I’m going to show you a couple of the common ones and hopefully you’ll pick up how to create your own along the way.
Creating your own Advanced Segment (brand keywords)
In the left hand menu of Google, under My Customizations you’ll find the link to Advanced Segments. This is your advanced segments toolbox (if you like) and this is where you create and manage your own custom segments.
In this example, we’re going to segment out our brand keywords which will provide insight into the effect of brand name based search engine traffic across all of the various Google Analytics reports. Click on ‘Create new customer segment’ in the top right corner.
Now, click on ‘Traffic Sources’ from the Dimensions menu on the left and then find ‘Keywords’. Drag this dimension into your custom segment builder (the area in the middle’. Next to condition, select ‘contains’, then add a value – which in this case will be your brand name.
If you have a brand name that could easily be spelt wrong or perhaps shortened, you can use an OR statement. Just select ‘Add “or” statement’.
Give the segment a name (a field at the bottom of the page) and then hit ‘Test Segment’. This will show you what your custom segment looks like in relation to total visits. Save it.
You can now apply this segment to most of Google’s reports. It’s particularly interesting to see how things like average basket value or conversion rate fairs for brand based terms compares with your traffic as a whole.
One more – big spenders
If you’re your website is eCommerce, there are a number of things you can do with custom segments. Say for example, we wanted to learn more about the source of your biggest spending customers?
Drag ‘Revenue’ from the Metrics menu on the left of the custom segments management area and select the condition. I’ve used ‘Greater than or equal to’ and the value 100 to only show information for visitors that spent over £100 in one transaction.
You could use other metrics in a similar way. Choose quantity to show information for visitors that bought a certain number of products in one transaction for example.
Experiment
The easiest way to get to grips with Advanced Segments is to start customizing your own. It’s also a great tool to analyse your data on an ad-hoc basis.
John Ryder is the Commercial Director at Silverbean. If you have any questions or would like to discuss how Silverbean can help you achieve your oneline marketing objectives through good usability; please contact John using one of the following.