Ooh, first post on the new blog… Anyway, I delivered some in-house Google Analytics training to a client yesterday and demonstrated the use of Advanced Segments. This is a really important aspect of Analytics, because without segmentation, you will just be viewing aggregated data that is far too general to make any serious decisions with.

Advanced Segments are great, because you can choose the segment of your visitors that matters to you, then browse through all the Analytics reports that now contain data about only that segment. The example I used yesterday was to create a segment for AdWords Conversions, i.e. only visitors who arrived via AdWords and completed a goal conversion. This is really easy to do, using the “Create a new advanced segment” option (click image for full size):

Not only does this tell us how many of our visitors match these criteria, but we can now browse around the reports knowing that the data is about just that group – so we can see the specific behaviour of AdWords visitors who convert (in this case, make an enquiry).

That means we know what pages they look at, how long they spend on them, what they do after they convert – essentially, information that means we can make our site and our AdWords campaign more effective. Maybe they all go to a particular page before converting, in which case, we should test a change of landing page that one to see if the campaign converts better.

There are hundreds of other ways and reasons to use Advanced Segments – if this has given you a taster, why not come along to our Increasing Conversion workshop?