Once you know how to use Google Analytics advanced segments, large amounts of data become available and simple to study. The sheer volume of the information is a bit daunting at first, but there are ways to segment Google Analytics data to make it easier to understand. This is crucial for optimizing your website to take full advantage of your traffic.
Getting Started with Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to isolate specific types of your data to help grasp what your traffic is telling you. The best way to begin is with the Ready-to-Use Advanced Segments that Google provides for their users. Some examples of these are below.
1. First-time visitors who buy. This is usually only a small portion of your visitors, but it is valuable information since understanding their motivations could allow a greater conversion of first-time visitors in the future.
2. Return visitors who buy. This information can help you understand what pulls a visitor back to your site and gets them to purchase something. Optimizing your website for this type of visitor can result in a greater rate of conversions.
3. Visitors who find your site by using your brand as a keyword. These visitors already connect to your brand and, their purchase behavior is different from other visitors. Finding a way to spread this type of behavior into your other traffic can help spread the brand.
Three Nice Features of Google Analytics
1. Users can compare up to four different segments of data side by side in reports.
2. The segments can apply to historical data even if the segment was just created.
3. The segments are not destructive reads and, the original data is completely intact.
Creating Advanced Segments In Google Analytics
Users who want to isolate very specific information that is not available using the prepared segments can create their own. The first step is deciding the type of segment you want and, the visitors you want to include. Here is a step by step method to segment data in the way you prefer.
1. You begin by deciding whether to include or exclude the metric you will define in your statement. The software default choice is to include, but clicking it will give you the drop-down menu to select exclude if needed. An example of this is choosing to have data returned to you that excludes all visitors from Canada if that was your chosen metric.
2. The next step is to select the metric that defines your data. One example is choosing what type of browser the visitors used to reach your site. You can select browsers and then elect to see only data from visitors who are using Firefox.
3. You must define the operators that will be used to segment Google Analytics data. For example, you can choose City as a selection. You can then add Contains and type in text such as Ham to the selection. This will return visitor data from cities that contain the letters ham like Hampton -Sydney or Buckingham. Changing Contains to Begins With will return Hampton-Sydney only in this case.
4. You can add more text to further refine the data. This can include the time when the visitors came to your site or where they came from among other options.
There are much more options to segment Google Analytics data including combining segments and more advanced techniques for analyzing the traffic from your site. This post has only touched on a few points to demonstrate the benefits of using this powerful software to optimize your website for business.
Let me know below, how do you use Google Analytics Advanced Segments?
