The last blog post shared
custom analytics reports that you can use to find amazing insights faster, enabling you to create a focused, truly data driven organization.
In this blog post I want to continue the
let's help make your day-to-day life better
path. I'll share three advanced segments that I personally find to be
of value in the process of moving from data to actionable insights. I
hope you'll download and use these segments, but more than that I hope
you'll learn how to create delightful analytics segments with the
options you have at your disposal.
I am an unabashed segmentation fan:
Web Analytics Segmentation: Do Or Die!
Without segmentation our analysis is focused on unrecognizable blobs
of traffic. Total Visits. Average Page Views Per Visitor. Overall
Conversion Rate. Yada, yada, yada. Boring. Useless. Life wasting.
With segmentation we focus on groups of people and we focus behavior
that has logical connections (everyone who used a particular keyword,
group that came via Twitter, people who viewed a TV ad, visitors who saw
more than 4 pages on our site etc., etc). That helps us understand data
& performance better. It helps us get data-gasms, improve ROI for
our web efforts and get our bosses promoted.
How can you not love that?
Below are examples of segments that help us make a lot more sense of
all the data we have and the insights that await us. You'll be able to
download these segments and import them into your Google Analytics
accounts and start using them right away!
Additionally, as I often do, you'll learn lots about the types of
delicious analyses you can do with these segments. For good measure
there is also a tutorial on regular expressions at the end (no good
analyst can live without regex!).
If you use Adobe's Site Catalyst or CoreMetrics or Yahoo! Web
Analytics or WebTrends or. . . you'll have enough detail below to create
a segment in 5 minutes in those tools as well. Trust me, it takes just 5
minutes and, like with Google Analytics, you won't need to update your
JavaScript tags or have to do extra work with IT or buy other expensive
versions of their products just to do segmentation.
Let's go. . . three awesome analytics data segments. . .
#1: Non-Flirts, Potential Lovers
Did I get your attention? :)
We all obsess with our bounced traffic because it seems nutty that
the person you spent so much time and love attracting to your website
bounced! They did not click to see another page. They did not hit play
on the video on the landing page. They did not click on a link on your
landing page to your corporate site. They just left.
Here's how that segment looks:
It is tempting to analyze these people. Where did they come from? What campaigns? What landing pages? Etc., etc.
You can find value, but to grow the business it is not prudent to focus on analyzing just the people who flirt with us.
Why not first analyze people who do engage with us?
At this point people switch to analyzing all the non-bounce traffic. This is how that segment looks (bottom right):
[The above is a standard segment in GA, just look under Default Segments.]
Better. Ignore the flirts. Focus on everyone else.
Unfortunately that is still a "blob." It includes anyone who just had
two "hits" in their visit (hits is a technical term for a page view,
event, custom variable, etc., etc., more than one hit = non bounce
visit).
I want us to be a lot more deliberate.
Look at the
Depth of Visit
report (standard report in GA in the Visitors section). It shows the
distribution of the pages people see on your site (not the "silly"
metric, average page views per session).
The distribution will show you the "tipping point," the point at
which a core group of people decide to stick with your site after
overcoming their initial "fears" (and your perhaps sub optimal pages!).
Segment that.
To use a metaphor. . . look for people who made it with you to a
third date. For many sites, but not all, that's people who have seen
three pages. It might take 14 pages to buy, but if they stay to three
they are giving you a chance. They might read 8 stories on your
non-ecommerce content site, but you note that people who see three
engage for a longer time.
Here's that segment:
So simple right?
These 7,610 Visits were ripe with promise. Some people ultimately
ended up buying, others just gave you a chance and decided not to
consummate.
Rather than focusing on the bounce traffic ("flirts") it is much much
more interesting and valuable to initially focus on people who give you
a chance.
Where did they come from?
12.11% from Organic Search via Google. Enough? Not enough?
More questions for you to answer. . . .
What pages did they enter on? What campaigns have a higher percentage
of these people? What countries? What keywords? What is the delta
between content they consume on your site compared to everyone else?
Look at the row with % of Total. . .
Helps you find what they are interested in, right?
More questions to answer. . .
Do they all happen to use the comparison chart first? Do they all
absolutely read the Sports section? What's so unique about them?
This an astoundingly simple segment to create. Yet analyzing visitor
behavior for this segment helps you identify, and perhaps do more of the
things you already know are working.
Do this first.
Here's how you can get this sweet and simple segment:
- Log into Google Analytics.
- Come back here.
- Now click on this link: Non-flirt Potential Lovers Segment. It will open in GA.
- Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.
If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url:
http://goo.gl/SuwKp
Have fun.
#2: Social Media, Baby!
Social media is all the rage. Suddenly Marketers have discovered that
convincing people to buy their products/services or read their content
or apply to university takes just two things:
A. 140 character missives sent frequently during the day extolling the glories of the company / newspaper / university
B. Creating a Facebook page, and then proceeding with the glory extolling
So easy. </ever so slight sarcasm> : )
Our job is to hold the feet of these adventurous people to the warm accountability fire, right?
[Remember everything below is only if you use Twitter, Facebook et al
for pimping. If you are participating in those media in the manner in
which you are supposed to, conversation and adding value rather than
pimping, then I encourage you to read my
Social Media Analytics post to learn what the best metrics and tools are.]
The challenge in measuring social media impact on your business is two-fold.
1. Most content gets consumed in applications (think tweetdeck, my beloved twicca,
mobile etc). They don't send referrers allowing us to tie to the source
with our analytics tool (any tool, GA or Omniture or CoreMetrics).
2. Splitting out activity that we caused vs. activity that was caused by others.
My recommendation is, again, two-fold.
First, if you tweet / update / tumble links back to yourself then
please for the sake of all that is holy in the world add campaign
tracking parameters.
Here's the link I tweet:
http://goo.gl/myisj
It points here:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/12/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports.html?utm_source=social-media&utm_medium=twitterfb&utm_campaign=aktw
See the campaign (utm_) tracking parameters? Trackability, sweet,
trackability!! Mobile, apps, html5 pages, bring it on. All visits
tracked!
[If you use Site Catalyst or WebTrends or Yahoo! Web Analytics your
campaign tracking parameters won't look like the above. Check with your
vendor and tag appropriately.]
Second, split your social media value analysis into two different
segments. Activity caused by you and activity on your site by all social
media visits.
You drag over Source and input the Value you are using to tag your SM
links, in my case the utm_source is imaginatively titled social-media.
This tracking mechanism (campaign tag) is used both on Twitter and
Facebook links. I can, and often do, split out Twitter and Facebook
separately by using a different value in the utm_medium value. I can
further segment them separately if I want. For now I want to analyze
them at a higher level together.
I did pimping. I got 2,486 Visits.
So what?
Easy question to answer, go to your outcomes report and apply your newly minted segment:
Pretty darn pathetic, right?
Only one of the above goals is connected to a "hard" conversion
(leads generated, Goal 2). The rest are "engagement" and videos played
and other such goals.
Still pathetic, right?
Do you know how awesome, or not, social media efforts directly initiated by you are? It's not that hard. Go figure it out.
Oh and yes, you don't have to stop here. You can apply this segment to your amazing
Page Efficiency Report,
to your Visitor Loyalty and Recency reports, to your. . . well any
report you have. That allows you to measure a broader view of the
success of your social media efforts, rather than my effort to instantly
put your feet in the fire! :)
Here's how you can get this social media segment:
- Log into Google Analytics.
- Come back here.
- Now click on this link: My Social Media Traffic Segment. It will open in GA.
- Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.
If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url:
http://goo.gl/fvuXP
Time to create our second, more expansive, social media segment.
As I had mentioned above, this time around we'll look at the social
media to our website(s) from our efforts as well as that of all our
friends / BFFs / haters.
Before you create this segment you should go checkout your All
Traffic Sources report and see how your web analytics tool is capturing
various channels people show up from. Based on that review of my site,
here's the segment:
A quick explanation.
Values for twitter, facebook, sphinn, stumbleupon are there for
people who use web based versions of these social media websites. I can
add delicious, digg etc., etc., if I want to. They are simply not that
important a source of traffic for me. See why the review of the All
Traffic Sources report recommended above was important?
[Some people will obsess and create a ginormous catch-all segment.
But remember, you don't need to understand data from the last 10
visitors to make smart decisions.]
The value for "social-media" is there to capture the social media
campaigns tagged by me. See our first social media segment above. You'll
use your own tracking values.
Value for awe.sm is because for a while I was using awe.sm to
auto-tag all my links. There are some latent visits which should get
flushed out of the system in the near future (as I have standardized on
www.goo.gl and
www.bit.ly).
That's *my* All Social Media Segment.
If you are thinking: "Good lord that is messy!"
Welcome to the world of social media tracking. It is messy-ever
changing-and you should know that you are going to babysit this
constantly. Sorry. [Also see comment above about needing the last 10
visitors: you don't!]
But after you create the segment, awesomeness follows. . . analysis!
Step one: Answer: "So What?"
Better, but honestly still pretty pathetic. Remember the goals are a mix of hard and soft conversions (see above)!
By now I am never surprised when I see the above result for Social
Media efforts of most outcomes-driven pimping efforts via those
channels.
Perhaps you are an exception. Now you know how to measure it!
As mentioned above Analysis Ninjas won't stop at just Outcomes
analysis and will dig deeper to see if there is any value that this
traffic is adding to our company. My personal favorite place to start is
Visitor Loyalty analysis.
Ok so these people are not delivering any hard or soft conversions. Does their loyalty profile look any different?
Here, check it out (standard report in Google Analytics and other tools):
Hmm. . . a very different profile from other visitors to the site.
Other traffic to the site has much less loyalty than social media
traffic. See the delta between 60.98% and 44.35% in the first two rows?
Also see the much better, sweeter, distribution for Visitors who visit
from 9-14 times through 26-50 times.
For this content website there is value in the social media efforts
in that they are delivering an audience that tends to then be much more
loyal than all other traffic that ends on their website.
Provable value! From social media!! I know!!! :)
A couple more ideas for our Ninjas to dig deeper, and types of analysis they could do to determine other types of value.
It is trivial to measure the base metrics for your website for your
Social Media segment. Visits, Pages/Visit, Average Time on Site, % New
Visits, Bounce Rates, Conversion Rates. . . . and so on and so forth. . .
You can quickly see at an aggregate level, or a detailed level, if
your social media are delivering on the promise outlined by your
$150,000 Social Media Consultant.
Here's another bit of analysis that can be useful for certain types of websites.
Say you have a real estate website, or you are responsible for
craigslist.com. Both sites are primarily internal site search driven.
People come to the site, search, find what they want, do business.
Take your newly beloved Social Media segment and apply it to your delightfully sweet pre-configured
Internal Site Search reports. [Left nav -> Content -> Site Search]
Here's what you'll see. . .
You'll be able to analyze if people who come to your site from your
Social Media campaigns engage with your site more or less (Total Unique
Searches per Visitor). Do they exit from the internal site search
results faster or slower (% Search Exits)? Do they have a harder time or
an easier time finding the right result (Results Pageviews/Search and %
Search Refinements)? And other such analysis.
You don't have to just report clicks and visits from social media. In
our real estate website we got to the root of what's a deeper
engagement (searching) and we got down to measuring real value (or lack
thereof).
Ready to do some
real social media ROI analysis?
Here's how you can get the all social media traffic segment:
- Log into Google Analytics.
- Come back here.
- Now click on this link: All Social Media Visits Segment. It will open in GA.
- Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.
If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url:
http://goo.gl/YnJON
Good luck!
#3: Search Queries With Multiple Keywords [3, 4, 5, 10, 20]
On this blog and in my keynotes I have bemoaned the obsession
Marketers have with brand keywords and their sub optimal strategy of
optimizing for keywords, rather than key phrases.
I am a
search long tail lover.
It is the way to happiness (and finding relevant users!). Hence our
first segment focuses on helping you understand the balance between
keywords and key phrases in the queries used by Visitors from search
engines.
It is not actually a "segment," it is more like using advanced
segmentation as a reporting engine in a way you can only do in Google
Analytics!
My strategy is simple. Use a regular expression to get GA to segment
search queries into various "words this query contains" buckets. Here's
what it looks like:
"Magical" part: ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$
Not that magical actually, just a humble regular expression. It is
looking for the number of words in a query (in this case queries
visitors typed into Google or Bing or Baidu that contained three words).
The second regex counts visits with four word search queries.
[A quick note of thanks to Nick Mihailovski for helping me come up
with the perfect regular expression. I was using ^\w*\s\w*\s\w*$. It was
good but would not have caught some variations and it would not work
for queries in non-English character languages.]
Ok back to using advanced segmentation as a long tail search report.
The final segment I have created, using the method above, has more
"or" conditions that contain buckets for counting search queries with 3,
4, 5, 10, 20 and 20+ words. You can of course create any buckets you
like; these were ones I find initially interesting.
When you click the Test Segment button (top right) you get this gratifying view (cropped to a small size):
Delightful right? It really is.
You get such an immediate sense of the long tail in a way that is hard otherwise in the mass of queries from search engines.
521 Visits from people who typed more than 10 words into Google/Bing!
There were 36 visits by people using 20 words in their search query!
And 237 people typed in more than 20+ words as their search query!
OMG!
Is your search engine optimization and paid search strategy
accommodating for this type of behavior? You still bidding on a word or
two?
While the above is not even your complete search universe view, it is
a very simple and straightforward way to appreciate how long your
search tail is.
And notice you did not even look at a report. You could do all of the above in the advanced segmentation view!
You likely want other buckets than 3, 4, 5, 10 , 20. No problem. Just
download the segment below and make the appropriate changes and bam!
Here's how you can get this search long tail segmentation reporting:
- Log into Google Analytics.
- Come back here.
- Now click on this link: Search Query Length Segment. It will open in GA.
- Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.
If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url:
http://goo.gl/v3KbM
Being the Ninja that you are I am sure your thirst of knowledge is not satiated.
Now you are probably wondering how the bounce rate looks for one
segment of the long tail traffic (lower usually) or how the conversion
rate looks (higher usually) or how many pages do they see (more
engagement usually) etc., etc.
The above segment won't help you with that. But all you have to do is create the segment you want.
For example here's the segment for people who see four words exactly:
Save the segment, here it is:
Visits via Search Queries containing 4 words.
Now apply it to your favorite search report and hello sweet, sweet delicious data!
You know the search queries, you know how many people came and you
know their performance ("engagement" or conversions or downloads or
leads etc., etc).
Furthermore, you can also segment this data by Paid Search and
Organic Search, or Google vs. Bing and start to do very focused analysis
that should fundamentally improve your search marketing program.
You can also take another slice at segmenting your search head, mid,
and tail. For example you can easily create a segment for Visitors who
came to your site via search queries that had
more than four words in the query.
Here's that segment:
Visits via Search Queries with more than 4 words.
Now go apply it to your search engine or organic search or paid
search or goals reports and do really valuable analysis that will earn
you the eternal love and adoration of your peers and superiors!
[SIDEBAR]
In case you wanted to do something more sophisticated beyond what's
outlined above here are a quick set of instructions, and a tutorial on
using regex.
If you want to create a segment for search queries that contain just
one word use this regular expression in your advanced segment:
^\s*[^\s]+\s*$
If you want Visits with two words in Google search queries use this:
^\s*[^\s]+\s+[^\s]+\s*$
or
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1}\s*$
If you want to identify Visits by people who use three words in their search queries:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$
Now you can keep adding to the number in parenthesis and do a happy dance.
Some more cute things.
If you want to query for more than x words, say more than three words use this:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2,}\s*$
Did you see the comma after the number two above? Good.
If you want to identify all search queries where visitors to your
site typed 2 or 3 words into the search engine, use this regular
expression:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$
Fun eh?
So what the heck are all those characters in these regular
expressions doing? Glad you asked. Let's consider the regular
expression we used to identify 2 word search queries.
The expression is (identified above): ^\s*[^\s]+\s+[^\s]+\s*$
Here's an explanation (as best as I can express in lay terms). . .
^ start at the beginning of the line
\s* match zero or more white space characters
[^\s]+ match at least one or more non-white space character
\s+ match at least one or more white space character
[^\s]+ match at least one or more non-white space character
\s* match zero or more white space characters
$ end of string
I hope all this "magic" makes a lot more sense.
[/SIDEBAR]
Isn't advanced segmentation cool? And to think you did all this with
your standard javascript tag, all on the fly (including historical data
analysis) and without having to buy extensive expensive add-ons!
Ok it's your turn now.
What are your absolutely dearest advanced segments? What's the
coolest thing you have done with the advanced segmentation capability in
your web analytics tool? Care to share some of your favorites? Perhaps a
downloadable link?
It would be incredible to have your wisdom help all of us. Please participate.
Thanks.
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