Google have just announced a new update to their advanced segments which gives more power and flexibility, helping you to analyse the traffic to your site. Advanced segmentation in Google Analytics has always been a popular and powerful feature allowing you to segment visits by various criteria such as “Paid Traffic” and “Visits with Conversions”.
With the new Google Analytics segmentation, segmentation has been extended beyond just reporting on visits and now centres on measuring and understanding individual users over time, as opposed to just single visit based behaviour. This means you can build your own segments based on users who fit a certain criteria, for example users who spend £500 over a period of 30 days, as opposed to those who spent £500 within a single visit – which how it currently is.
The new enhancements therefore mean you can report on multiple visits from the same user within a specific time period (up to 90 days), therefore allowing you to understand the value of each visitor type or group of users to your site.
New Features
The new segment builder feature makes it easier for new Analytics users, yet also more powerful for seasoned analysts and marketers. New features in particular include:
- Ability to group customers/ create cohorts – for example, customers who first visited within a specified timeframe.
- Segmentation based on user behaviour – for example, customers who started on a specific landing page, visited some particular pages and ended up converting.
- Segment Templates – Google has provided 6 templates for you to start with, including; ‘Demographics’, ‘Technology’, ‘Behaviour’, ‘Data of First Visit’, ‘Traffic Sources’ and ‘E-commerce’. You of course have the ability to create your own conditional segments.
- New User Interface – displays segment criteria in a more visible and readable way to allow to you to quickly build your segment.
This seems to be a positive enhancement from Google, as it will give Google Analytics’ users a more relevant insight into how groups of customers behave on the site, and answers questions like “does my blog content help drive more sales and revenue?”
New Advanced Segments will be rolling out to all users over the next couple of months. For more details on this click here.
