Advanced Segments with Google Analytics

Advanced Segments with Google Analytics

Advanced Segments with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic, enterprise grade analytics programme that features great advanced functionality. We've already explored the importance of using analytics to understand how your visitors are interacting with your website and how you can use this information to improve your site's usability and maximise conversion. Today, we'd like to look at this in a little more detail.

Among Google Analytics' great features for even better analysis of your data is Advanced Segments. Essentially, segments allow you to easily isolate and analyse specific, defined sections of your traffic side by side.

At the top of the dashboard - you can easily activate pre-defined Advanced Segments by using the drop-down on the top right hand side of the screen (in the grey bar). By selecting any number of the default segments, you're able to compare these metrics next to each other on your reports. And, as you move around in your reports, these segments will remain in place allowing you to extract more meaningful analysis from your analytics data.

The pre-defined segments include a number of useful everyday metrics such traffic sources, paid and non-paid traffic, visits with conversions and non-bounce visits.

But, as they say on the home shopping channels, "that's not all!". Can't find the segment you're looking for? Or want to define a segment even further? No problem!

Click on "create a new advanced segment", or click on "Advanced Segments" in the My Customizations menu. Here you will be able to create a new segment by simply dragging and dropping dimensions and metrics into the fields around the "and"/"or" statements. You then specify conditions and values for each and test the segment to see the number of visitors to which these specified rules apply.

Once you're happy with your segment you can name it and save it. Now you're able to easily select it from the list and apply it to any one of your reports.

How can you apply this on a practical level? Let's say you run an African travel website and you're interested in seeing which destinations are most popular on your website. The first step would be to check if there are any unique identifiers in your URLs for these pages. If the URLs use variables as unique identifiers, say "country=botswana", "country=southafrica" and "country=namibia" - then you're in business! Note what these are.

In your advanced segments tab, click "create new advanced segment". Drag the "Page" dimension (from the Content section of the menu) into the field. Select the condition "contains" and select the appropriate value for the identifier. Test the segment to see that it's working. Name the segment appropriately and save it. Do the same for each of the destinations you want to segment.

Now, you are able to apply these custom advanced segments to your reports to compare data such as visits to each section, bounces, pageviews and new visits for each segment side by side.

Advanced segments are also particularly useful if you're looking to analyse purchasing behaviour. It's possible, for example, to segment visitors from specific cities or regions who made a purchase on your site. You can then more easily see what products and pages these people looked at, this may give you a better understanding of where to focus your marketing efforts.

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