How advanced Google Analytics drives ecommerce improvements

Google Analytics’ standard reporting amalgamates data from all traffic sources. As powerful as this data is, it may be sometimes limiting for effective measurement of specific marketing campaigns or segments of traffic.

By Kunle Campbell at Fuzz One Media

Google Analytics’ advanced segments helps customise and filter GA reports by specific pre-configured and custom segments that help find the insights you need.

What are advanced segments?

Advanced segments can be accessed on the top left of your Analytics dashboard. Clicking on ‘Advanced Segments’ would drop-down a list of ‘Default Segments’ and ‘Custom Segments’. The default segments that come pre-loaded with GA allows traffic filtering with the following options as standard:

1.    All Visits (default)
2.    New Visitors
3.    Returning Visitors
4.    Paid Search Traffic (from both Bing Ads and AdWords)
5.    Non-paid Search Traffic  (from all search engines)
6.    Search Traffic (from all search engines)
7.    Direct Traffic
8.    Referral Traffic
9.    Visits with Conversions
10.    Visits with Transactions
11.    Mobile Traffic
12.    Tablet Traffic
13.    Mobile and Tablet Traffic
14.    Tablet and Desktop Traffic
15.    Non-bounce Visits

Advanced segments allow multiple selections, which is ideal for comparing the performance of two or multiple traffic sources. As an example, the performance of ‘Paid Search Traffic’ and ‘Non-paid Search Traffic’ can be selected and compared in real time in GA.

Application of advanced segments in ecommerce

The segmentation and insights advanced segments provide are hugely valuable in the context of eCommerce as they actually help with market segmentation at website traffic level.

As an example, if an eCommerce manager wanted to justify an investment in responsive design, a ‘mobile and tablet traffic’ advanced filter could be used to prove that conversions from mobile and tablet devices have been on a steady rise on the site. Advanced segments might also be used to prove that the average time on site for ‘mobile and tablet users’ is much lower than that of desktops.

Custom Segments – where the power lies

Custom segments allow a lot of flexibility beyond the standard list of filter options. Here’s how to create custom filters:

1.    Click on the ‘Advanced Segment’ button on the top left of your dashboard – this should reveal a list of Default Segments on the left and Custom Segments on the right.
2.    Click on the ‘+ New Custom Segment’ button on the top right (just below the Custom Segments box)
3.    Name your Segment
4.    Filtering traffic has over 100 Include/Exclude filter options. The most popular being:

•    City
•    Campaign
•    Country / Territory
•    Landing Page
•    Medium
•    Language
•    Operating System
•    Products
•    Source

5.    Important point to note is that filters of data can be layered. As an example, I have a Google organic only segment for managing SEO campaigns by using two filters:

Include Source Exactly Matching Google
AND
Include Medium Exactly Matching organic

This segment reveals only Google organic traffic as against the Standard Segment for Non-paid Search Traffic. I could decide to take it a notch up by adding an additional layer for ‘City’ Exactly Matching London if I wanted to view organic Google traffic from London.

6.    Finally you would need to test or preview your segment before saving, allowing you to find errors and make necessary corrections. Tests that return no data may indicate issues.

If a particular segment is of importance to your business, I would strongly recommend scheduling email reports for that specific segment as Google Analytics supports this feature.

This way, you are able to monitor the performance of the specific segment. I often do this for SEO campaigns I manage by creating an ‘organic Google only’ custom segment and then setting up scheduled daily email reports for this segment to monitor performance.

Kunle Campbell is a digital marketing strategist and founder of Fuzz One Media, an Oxford, based agency that offers integrated digital marketing agency targeting ecommerce businesses.