New Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation: What does it change?
This Summer of 2013, Google Analytics is rolling out its new segmentation. Segmentation was a key feature when launched in October 2008 (http://analytics.blogspot.be/2008/10/more-enterprise-class-features-added-to.html). Since then it has allowed Digital Analysts to easily access the right “groups” of visits they wanted to analyze right into the interface of Google Analytics.
Segmentation is key
I previously wrote a post about why segmentation is so important (Segmentation importance). Basically, imagine that your eshop received 10 visits yesterday. 5 of them bounced and just saw one single page. The other 5 visits engaged with your products catalogue and saw 11 pages on average. Your global site performance will be 10 visits, 60 pageviews (5x1 + 5x11). On average, you will have 6 pageviews per visit.
Now you realize that saying “my performance is quite good because on average a visit on my site sees 6 pages” might be wrong. Actually, 50% of your traffic acquisition might have a problem because they bounced. Regarding the other half, you’ll probably be happy with the pages/visit metric.
Difference Visits and Unique Visitors
Nothing new here. A Unique Visitor can be compared to a single person (technically it’s obviously slightly different) while a Visit is … a Visit on a website made by ... a Unique Visitor.
A Unique Visitor will then probably visit your eshop several times before buying. With the Google Analytics Multi Channel Funnels, you are able to associate the previous visits to transaction (Understanding Google Analytics Multi Channel Funnels). A Unique Visitor came through email first and did not buy. He came back in direct and did not buy. Finally, he clicked on a Remarketing Ad and bought his coffee machine.
So what’s new in the Advanced Segmentation?
Actually a pretty big change is happening. Google Analytics is adding a totally new way of segmenting the data by going from the visit scope to the visitor perspective.
How was the advanced segmentation before? Let’s say I want to see all the visits from visitors having made more than 2 transactions last month. This was just not possible. Why? Because we could only filter the Visits. When a visitor make a transaction it happens during one of its visits. I could have made a first transaction two weeks ago = one transactional visit. And then, made a second transaction one week ago = one transactional visit. But Google Analytics could make the link between these two transactional visits and realize that they were made by the same Unique Visitor.
Moving to the visitor scope, the new Google Analytics advanced segmentation will allow us to see all the visits made by the Users (=Unique Visitors) who made two transactions last month.
The New Advanced Segmentation
See how the New Advanced Segmentation looks like:
At different levels, you can now filter by Visits or Users:
Let’s say we want to segment all the Visitors who made more than 2 Transactions:
Now we can analyse the users who made more two transactions. For instance, if I go in the Audience Report, I can see that on the last period of time we had 28 Frequent Buyers who made 160 Visits:
written by Nicolas Debray