3 Easy Ways to Segment Your Web Analytics Data to Increase Your Conversion Rates

Every B2B marketer wants to increase their website’s conversion rates. No matter what the goal of your website is, to get more subscribers, to capture leads or just to educate and inform, you website has a goal, and getting more visitors to convert helps maximize your website’s ROI.

One of the best ways to ensure that your website is optimized for conversion is to make sure that you’re using web analytics properly so that you know what your visitors are looking for, and how to provide it for them.

Today’s post will discuss the ways in which you can use Google Analytics to segment your traffic data to help you get a better idea of your visitors, where they are coming from, how they are finding you, what they are looking for and their behavior on your website once they arrive. This post will only make reference to Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments, this is the tool we use here at Marqui, and the one we suggest to most of our customers because it is easy to use, has a minimal learning curve and is feature-rich.

Why should you segment your data?

The better (and deeper) your insight into your customers’ behavior, search terms, locations etc, the better your understanding of what they are looking for. The more you understand your target audience the easier it is for you to cater to them and what they’re looking for which should increase your conversion rates.
The reason that web analytics data is so important, is that it can provide you with ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS, but to do this effectively, it needs to be segmented to provide you with the most specific and precise data as possible.

As Google Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik has said after segmenting, “You’ll understand behavior of micro-segments of your website visitors, which in turn will lead you to actionable insights because you are not focusing on a “glob” rather you are focused on a “specific””.

How do you create an advanced segment?

1. Login to your Google Analytics account. Near the top of your dashboard view you will see a drop down menu called “Advanced Segments.” Clicking on the drop down, opens up a new Advanced Segments view where you can choose from a list of “Default Segments,” create a new advanced segment, or manage all of your advanced segments. For today’s post we’re going to be creating new advanced segments.
2. On the left hand side of the advanced segments menu, you can click on the hyperlink for “create a new advanced segment.”This opens up a new view where you can begin to create your segments. 
3. Being by choosing your dimension or metric from the menu on the left hand side of the screen and then drag and drop it into the “dimension or traffic” box and continue adding “or” or “and” statements until you’re happy with your segment. Name the segment and either create it, to be managed later, or create it and immediately apply it to your report.

 






How can you segment traffic data to help you measure and increase conversion rates?

Segment by Location
Depending on your business, you might work for a company that sells specifically to one region or country, or you may just want to get a better understanding of which geographical location (city, country, region etc.) the majority of your traffic comes from for better targeted marketing campaigns. Segmenting your data by location allows you to view your conversion rates by specific locations so you can measure you conversion rates per location, rather than on an overall traffic basis.
To create this segment, choose which location dimension you’d like to segment for (city, region, country/territory, continent, sub-continent region etc), drag and drop the dimension into the reporting area on the right and then name and create the segment.




Segment by Search Keywords
This is one of the most basic and crucial ways to segment your website’s traffic. You can use Google Analytics to segment by specific keywords to monitor the success of individual keywords to measure how well your optimization tactics are working. Like all the other segments, you can use Google’s default keywords or define your own. You set this up the same way as any other advanced segment under custom segments. Drag the keyword dimension into the reporting area on the right, choose “Matches Exactly” from the drop down and then enter your keyword then name and create the segment.




Segment by Content
Your content is important for linkbaiting and SEO, but it is also an important way to get insight into your website conversions. Segmenting by content is a great way to tell how well your content is converting on its own. By segmenting your data to show only visits and visitors that used individual content as entry pages you can tell how well that piece of content converted.

You can create this segment by choosing the “Landing Page” dimension under the “Content” heading, dragging and dropping it into the reporting area then choosing, “Matches Exactly” and picking the content page you’d like to segment for, and, once again, name and create the segment.



Hopefully this post has given you some insight into why advanced segmentation of your Google Analytics data is important, and a few ways on how you can get started segmenting. To once again quote Avinash Kaushik, “analyzing [web analytics] data in aggregate is a crime.”

For a great resource on web analytics, we suggest taking a look at Avinash Kaushik’s Blog, “Occam’s Razor.”

Posted by Amberlie Denny at September 8, 2010 8:00 AM

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