As you probably know by now, I’m a bit of a fan of Google Analytics. It’s something I use on every account I work on, every day of the week. I want to break down a couple of ways that you can segment to better understand your customer. Here are my top 3 ways to use market segmentation within Analytics to improve your online marketing results.

1) Geographic

If you are a national business that ships nationwide or thinking about taking that next step interstate, this one is for you. Geographic segmentation is a fantastic way to break your traffic down by location and understand where the quality is coming from. The three steps in setting this up are below:

Step 1) Create a new segment
Step 2) Select your region
Step 3) Select the state
 

What this allows you to do is view how people from this particular state interact with your website. It takes the geographic statistics normally found in your audience tab to a whole new level. Let’s say you’re looking into expanding into South Australia. Setting up a ‘South Australian’ segment allows you to view AdWords traffic from that state, referral traffic from that state, return visits, mobile traffic, conversion data… anything at all. It opens up a whole new world of analysis and can help you to better understand your customers and help you to make the best possible decisions.

2) Breaking down your referral traffic

Again, creating segments out of various traffic sources can be a great way to better measure how successful your efforts are in that particular area. Analytics does break this down to some extent however not enough for my liking! For example, it offers us the ability to break down the traffic to ‘Social’ -- meaning that anything coming to your site from any form of social media is being lumped under the one umbrella.

Now this is cool, but let’s say you do really well from something such as Pinterest, yet Facebook is letting you down. By creating custom segments for each source of your social media traffic, you can better understand where the quality is and hone in on this source. Learn what is working within this source by analysing the data, and apply that to your other social sources.

3) Segmenting events

The third and final tip to better understanding consumer behaviour on your website is segmenting by events. If you have event tracking set up through Analytics, you can set up an event segment and analyse people who trigger that event and how they behave in and around that event. Confused? It’s not as tough as it sounds. An example could be someone who has a checkout process which has a ‘register’ or ‘checkout as a guest’ function. You can track the event of these buttons being clicked during the checkout process. Segmenting this traffic gives you an insight into how people who checkout as a guest behave. Do they convert, do they purchase or do they abandon their cart?

Final Words

Looking into these kinds of things can really help you understand your website performance and understand if things are running as efficiently as they could be, or if there is room for improvement. There are many more examples of how you can use segmentation to better understand your website/customers. My biggest piece of advice is to jump into Analytics and just give it a go. The great thing is you can’t break it. It will either work, or it won’t. As a result you can get into the segmentation, familiarise yourself with how it works and see what you can learn from it!