Fit and Finish: Insight from the Ironworks User Experience Group

Celebrating Social Media Week!

With Social Media Week 2012 coming to a close we like to share a few thoughts on how we’re shaping our digital strategies today! We’ve addressed social media on Fit and Finish before but for this post we want to share three focal points to identify before putting together a digital strategy.

The Power of Advanced Segments

Advanced segments are one of my favorite features of Google Analytics.  They are a powerful tool for slicing, dicing, and analyzing specific segments of your traffic that help you to  better understand WHO your customers are and WHAT they are looking for on your website.  

What are advanced segments?

• Advanced Segments allow you to isolate and analyze specific kinds of traffic.
• One of the most powerful features of Google Analytics for analyzing website traffic

Marketers spend a ton of time and money conducting research to understand who their audiences are and their behavior patterns.  Just like traditional marketing, the same is true of marketing your website to get the most value. 

If you continuously look at your site traffic without applying advanced segments, it is very easy to miss valuable insights into exactly what part of your audience is doing what. 

 

Advanced Segments vs. Profile Filters

Advanced segments

• Used to filter the Analytics data you're viewing in a report
• Can view historical data 
• You can see and compare multiple advanced segments side by side in reports

Filters

• Applied to the information coming into your account, to manipulate the final data in order to provide specialized reports
• Can only view data going forward from when the filter was created
• You can only view data for one filtered profile at a time.

 

Types of Advanced Segments: Default and Custom

Google Analytics provides a variety of default advanced segments that are quite useful.

• New Visitors
• Returning Visitors
• Paid Search Traffic
• Non-paid Search Traffic
• Search Traffic
• Direct Traffic
• Referral Traffic
• Visits with Conversions
• Mobile Traffic
• Non-bounce Visits

Advanced Custom Segments can help you analyze several aspects of your website and web or Marketing strategy, including:

• SEO efforts
• Link building campaigns
• Social media strategy
• Keyword performance
• Conversion optimization

 

Why I love them:

• Advanced segments are retroactive meaning you can look at historical data. 

• Site averages can be misleading.  Advanced segments really help you to understand the data in front of you. 

• Top-level reports in Google Analytics are not going to help you identify what the serious problems are or where they are coming from.

 

Advanced segments have the power to help you determine your marketing objectives and study the behavior that is right in front of you.  Instead of spending loads of time and money on in-depth market research, take a look at the information that is right in front of you!