Break down your Google Analytics visitor data into manageable chunks with Advanced Segments

If you are trying to gleam relevant insights about your website’s visitor behavior, but are only looking at basic Google Analytics data like “New Visits”, “Unique Visitors”, “Bounce Rate”, “Visit Duration” and “Pages per Visit” you need to read this post!

No, i’m not going to get into how you create complex custom dashboards in Google Analytics. I’m just going to show you a quick and dirty way to dig a little deeper into Google Analytics data using “Advanced Segments”.

At the top of almost any Analytics page you will find the “Advanced Segments” button.
mobile search

What it allows you to do is easily isolate and analyze a sub-set of your website’s traffic. There is a ton of predefined segments that you can choose from – of course my favorite is “Visits with Conversions” – or you can create your own segments using the segment builder.

So for example, imagine looking at all visits that came from a pay-per-click(PPC) campaign and also having a sub-set of data reflecting the conversions that came from that same PPC campaign. Or looking at traffic sources to your site and how each of those drove conversions. This type of analysis is where real website ROI lives and Advanced Segments is a quick and dirty way of gleaming them from the data quickly. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

If you want a more in-depth explanation of how Advanced Segments work – here is a video.

by Josh Becerra

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