Wakefly BlogAdvanced Segmentation Will Improve Your Results

Google Analytics offers the ability to use and create custom segments or filters for more targeted reporting. Why is this important? This is important because it can affect and influence your content as well as your online marketing practices and ultimately, your results. Advanced Segmentation was introduced by Google awhile back but it is still a hidden gem for many.  Segments allow you to isolate and analyze subsets of data based on your segment criteria but does not change the underlying data.

Segments are made up of dimensions and metrics using Dimension Groups that include Demographics (e.g., age, gender, language, etc), Technology (by web and mobile technologies such as Operating System, Browser, Device, etc.), Behavior (how often your users visit and conduct transactions), Date of First Session, Traffic Sources (how did your users find you, e.g., campaigns, medium, source, and keywords). These define the filter itself. Then you set the scope of the filter based on Hit (behavior confined to a single action such as viewing a page or submitting a form), Session (behavior within a single session so it one or more actions during a session); and finally, User (behavior across all sessions within a date range). You can combine multiple dimensions to a specific segment.

These segments can help:

• Develop an audience profile so that you can target your content and products as well as try to develop the audiences you are not reaching. For example, during a finite period, how is a specific audience (age, gender, geographic location) behaving (where are they going, what actions are they taking, what and how much are they buying).
• Measure the effectiveness of specific keywords being targeted in Google Ads.
• Determine the effectiveness of different campaigns you are tracking.
• Understand the profile of those users who are converting to identify your marketing successes versus those users who do not convert and why so that you can improve your marketing efforts in those areas.
• Target your best eCommerce customers based on their spending amounts and habits so that you can cater to them and find more of them.

In addition, there are two Advanced criteria based on Conditions and Sequences that lets you include multiple user conditions, multiple visit conditions, or a combination of the two, measuring the impact of a single session behavior on the long term behavior of a user.  How might you apply that? An example might be to find out if a landing page or blog is driving more sales and revenue. Sequence segments show how two actions (concurrent or separate) impact behavior between visits or within a single visit. A good example is a user who starts the checkout process but does not complete it therefore did not make the purchase.

With this information, you can create a potential purchaser segment for developing a remarketing campaign to increase completion success using promotions, coupons, and the like. This segment matches users who viewed product-detail pages, clicked Add To Cart, but never viewed the order-confirmation page that is always displayed at the end of an order, indicating that their orders were never completed.

Google offers a broad selection of predefined segments that can be used ‘as is’, tweaked or Wakefly can build a segment from scratch for your specific criteria. Google also has a gallery of pre-built segments.

Contact Wakefly to find out how we can implement segments to improve your overall results at 508.606.2042 or submit your information.