I recently had the pleasure of speaking at SphinnCon 2011. I’m sure that anyone there would agree that this year’s conference was really great.  Big thanks to Barry Schwartz for putting it together. Below is a copy of my presentation together with a screencast I put together for anyone who couldn’t make it (or would like to review). Enjoy!

Segmenting traffic in Google Analytics (or any other web analytics pacakge) is key for any analyst who is looking to get the most out of their data.  I have seen far too many businesses look at their analytics data in the aggregrate, without taking advantage of multiple profiles, advanced segments, or advanced filters.  The “slicing and dicing” of data that can be done in Google Analytics can really provide a tremendous amount of insight into one’s online marketing efforts - be they SEO, PPC, or Social Media.

The following series of brief blog posts highlight some real client cases that provide you some tips about how to segment your traffic in different ways (and “why” you should be doing it).

Segmentation & SEO

I was doing an SEO review for a client recently who was interested in getting the most ‘bang for their buck’ from there SEO efforts.  In particular, they were interested in knowing which terms should they be spending their time (=money) working on internally and outsourcing to SEO firms.

So my question was, “how have your SEO efforts been performing to date?”

Their answer: ”Pretty good.  Traffic seems to be going up.”

Organic Traffic

This was true.  Their traffic was going up.  But which traffic?  Branded searches?  Non-branded searches?  I knew that they were doing some marketing recently and that there has been some good buzz about their brand name.  The quickest way to get a sneak peek at branded and non-branded search terms, is to filter by keyword at the bottom of the page.

Continue reading “The Analytics Slice and Dice | The Importance of Segmentation Part I – SEO”

Understanding your conversion funnel is one of the keys to finding the best ways to improve your conversion rate.  The first thing to do is to identify which part of your funnel needs fixing.  For example, are people abandoning in the shopping cart?  Somewhere else in the checkout process? Continue reading “Advanced Segments to Track Conversion Funnels”

This is one of my favorite advanced segmentations. I often times find myself frustrated by the fact that keyword match types are all mashed together and reported as one keyword. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, they are three different keywords. For example, in Adwords

[podiums]
“podiums”
podiums

will have different CPCs, different average positions, different conversion rates, but in Google Analytics I only see

podiums

With one bounce rate, one conversion rate, one average pages per visit, etc.

Since I’m bidding and paying different amounts for different match types, I treat [podiums] differently than “podiums”. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could natively segment this in Analytics?

Continue reading “Segment by Match Type in Google Analytics”