After reading Avinash’s brilliant post about the importance of segmentation, and how all data in the aggregate is crap (read it here – it’s great) – it’s inspired us here to start segmenting and analysing ourselves. Segmenting:
- Visitors how frequently visit certain parts of websites
- Visitors who’ve provided a specific answer when registering on a site (these guys can easily be segmented using custom variables)
- Visitors with high average order values
- Visitors how buy specific products
… there are loads of ways you can segment your website visitors.
A basic marketing strategy would typically involve identifying market segments, and targeting them with specific messages. Websites and landing pages should follow this basic marketing principle too. A marketer should think about how different segments are interacting with their websites, measure this activity (which is where Google Analytics’ advanced segments and custom variable functionality comes in handy), and adapt their sites and pages accordingly.
Here’s an example of how we’ve used segments to analyse site activity.
Segmenting all converting visits allows you to understand what are those valuable pages on your site which are contributing to conversions.
We’ve also segmentated visitors based on what they’ve entered into forms, by calling the setVar function. For example, one of our clients principally have 2 categories of visitor who register on a site. In order to register, they have to specify what category they belong to. When they do this, GA drops a __utmv cookie in order to classify them, which means that data for the category as a whole will appear in the visitor reports of Google Analytics. This is great, because it means that we can then analyse at the usual GA stuff:
- Bounces
- Top content
- Goals / conversions
… all by category! More information on how to implement this can be found here.
So, think about your different types of web audience, think about how you can measure those types of web audience on the site, and start segmenting, segmenting, segmenting!
