Make Your Life Easier – Segment Stuff

MoreVisibility - August 15, 2008

It’s a bit surprising to me how many folks do not make use of their segmenting / cross-segmenting options in their Web Analytics Packages. Some folks don’t even know or aren’t even aware of what it means or what it does. So for today’s blog post, I would like to explain what it is, and how you can make use of it.

What is Segmenting?
In Analytics, segmenting is basically viewing one particular set of data by another set of data. It allows you to “drill-down” or “dig deeper” on a particular page, traffic source, or keyword.

For example, let’s say I am looking at data from my Google.com Organic Traffic. I can see how many Visits, Pageviews, and so on that came from the Google.com Organic Search Results. The next thing that I think about is to discover what keywords from the Google Organic Search Result sent me the traffic. In whatever analytics program you use, you should have a “Segment” or “Drill-Down” option that will allow you to do this, either from a drop-down menu or a series of checkboxes and submit buttons. Then, you’d be able to see the keywords that brought you traffic from Google.com on one page.

This, like the title of this blog, “makes your life easier”, because you don’t have to open multiple report windows or spend a lot of time trying to find things in your analytics package of choice.

Can you give me some more examples of things that I can do with segmenting?

Yes. Here are some of our favorites here at MoreVisibility:

1. Segmenting any Organic Traffic Source (Google Organic) by Keyword, to see which keywords brought traffic to your site,
2. Segmenting any Organic Traffic Source (Google Organic) by Landing Page, to see what visitors saw upon arriving at your website,
3. Segmenting any paid (Cost-Per-Click or CPC) Traffic Source by keyword or landing page,
4. Segmenting any page (like the homepage) by Visitor Type (New or Returning), to see how each group of individuals behaves on the pages of a website,
5. Segmenting a Landing Page (a CPC Landing Page) by Source, to see which initiatives were responsible for bringing in the traffic, and how each performed,
6. Segmenting a Campaign by Ad Content or Ad Group, so that you can see how each individual Ad Group performed in a cost-per-click program,
7. Segmenting a country in your Map Overlay or Geographical Areas report by Revenue (my favorite), so that you can see which states and cities brought in the most revenue,
8. Segmenting Browser or Operating System by Screen Resolution or Screen Colors (our graphic design team loves doing this),
9. Segmenting a Source by Hostname, to see what domains are collecting data on my account and which domains have tracking code on them
10. Segmenting anything by the User-Defined value in Google Analytics (which is already custom segmentation – so this is double segmentation!)

If you are someone who has never really made use of segmenting before, you need to start doing so right away. It’s a very powerful feature, and arguably the most important feature of all of web analytics, and you can really dig deep and slice & dice data in countless ways. It also saves you a bundle of time – and makes you look good, too!

As far as custom segmentation goes, this is great if your web analytics package has it. Play around with it and make use of creating custom segments to make you look even better! 🙂