Web Analytics – Ideas for Segmentations

Being able to segment your site traffic by different dimensions is very important in the world of web analytics. If your web analytics software can’t do that… think twice about it. Not only twice, if you can’t segment your metrics, then maybe it is time to dump it and at least use Google Analytics for free.

I’ve listed out some of my favorites and ideas for applying segmentation. You’ll see that a lot of the segmentation would be Segmentation A vs. Segmentation B, because the majority of segmentation would need to be applied so that you can compare to another data set. You can always compare to overall site data or even average for a specific time range.

Here are some examples of segmentations that could potentially assist your analysis.

  • New visitors vs. Returning Visitors
  • Direct vs. Search vs. Referring Sites
  • Converted vs. Did not convert
  • Registered vs. Not Registered
  • Advocates vs. Non Advocates
  • Branded Search vs. Non-Branded Search
  • Loyal Visitors vs. Non-Loyal Visitors
  • Users who put items in shopping cart but DID NOT purchase vs. Users who Purchased
  • Engaged Audience vs. Not Engaged Audience

Multi-level Segmentation
Once you set up your segmentation and execute you analysis, you will get more curious about deeper segmentation. Let’s call that multi-level segmentation.

Here is an example. Say you set up a segmentation analysis around new and returning visitors. Then it’ll be wise to look at the difference between these two segmented groups by the search keywords they used to arrive at your site. Let’s classify these groups as non-branded keywords and branded keywords.

It will look like this…
New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors broken down by branded terms and non-branded terms. Multi-level segmentation like this is do-able with careful implementation in Google Analytics. Other analytics applications do have such capacity to handle such segmentation so please consult with your vendors and their knowledge base.

Traffic Acquisition Segmentation 01

What makes multi-level segmentation nice to look at, is that it allows you to zoom into a specific group and learn the difference between one segmented group to the other.
In the image above, non-branded terms had higher traffic than branded terms under returning visitors segment. However, what if it was the other way around (branded terms referring higher traffic from returning visitors segment)??

That means you must have done something great to promote your brand, so that retuning visitors are using your brand name in their search.

Ultimately, you’d probably want your direct and returning traffic to increase continuously right?? Well, that is another multi-level segmentation for you.

Direct – new vs. returning
vs.
Non-Drect – new vs. returning

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  • Silvia

    Hello there, thanks for the post. Segmentation is really the most important thing in web analytics: your analysis can be quite misleading if you are not segmenting your traffic. There is a very effective analytics tool (at a fantastic price!!) that allows you to easily segment your reports. It’s called Logaholic Web Analytics. It’s a great tool that provides you with actionable insights into your site traffic and ROI.