Practical Example of Google Analytics New Advanced Segments

googleanalytics200 Practical Example of Google Analytics New Advanced SegmentsYesterday I posted a case study showing how email marketing is still relevant to Young Alumni.  Because it’s the day before Thanksgiving and it’s a little slow I’ve been doing a little more digging into that campaign.  A little over a month ago Google Analytics launched some new features including Advanced Segments and Custom Reporting.  Unfortunately most people probably haven’t had the time to play around with them to find really practical uses for these new features.  So let me give you one.

gimme 5 challenge example 150x150 Practical Example of Google Analytics New Advanced SegmentsOne of the things that was to segment the emails by class and each class was sent a unique email.  Now the only thing really unique about these emails was the class year mentioned in the email, but it was still segmenting our audience.  (Click on the thumbnail to the right to see an example)

Links in each email were tagged separately but all were a part of the same campaign “top_challenge” but each was applied to a different source, “Top 5_2008″ for example.  This allows us to view traffic data in Google Analytics both as a campaign but also by individual emails (the source).  Using the new Advanced Segments feature we can create Segments of each Source and view that against the whole campaign.

So now that I have created my segments looking at Source it’s time to head to the Campaign report and drill down into “top_challenge”.  Below is the report with the segments applied and comparing against three segments.  Note:  Google Analytics currently only allows you to apply against three segments.

I pulled this data today almost two months after the emails were sent out and they are still driving trickles of traffic to the site.

Because I have six segments I went ahead and created PDF’s of each.

  • Campaign 03, 04, 05 Segments
  • Campaign 06, 07, 08 Segments

It’s a little hard to view the segments in that graph.  So here is a weekly graph where you can distinctly see how the various segments measure.

So there you go an actual application for the new features.  If you are tracking campaigns in Google Analytics you might as well be viewing your segmented data a little clearer.  I’ve been playing around digging into reports looking at depth of stay on site and seeing how that compares across these groups, meaning creating custom report of three or more page visits against these segment groups.

So I challenge you to play around with these new features and share what you discover.  Hopefully they have been rolled out to everyone by now?

Additional Links showing Google Analytics new features

  • David Harry (aka The Gypsy) recently wrote an excellent two part post showing creating custom segments and reports for keyword analysis.  Part I & Part II
  • Avinash Kaushik introducing the new features and showing everyone how to Be an Analytics Ninja!

7 Responses to “Practical Example of Google Analytics New Advanced Segments”

  1. Says:

    Thanks for imparting more analytics wisdom. I’m glad you’re out there poking around in the depths of Google Analytics for the rest of us!

    And, Happy Thanksgiving!

  2. Says:

    I have played around with the advanced segments to gather data on a city area that we recently had a campaign. Had to go to Google maps and put in all of the names of the suburbs. Not sure how acurate the results are or if they can be trusted.

    Something weird happened with comparing it to historical data. The same name of the city/suburb would show up twice. One of the occurrences would have 0 visits during one year with the other having the normal and visa-versa.

    Anyways, thanks for the information on tagging Founderfrom this post and others. Makes a big difference in organizing information and where people come from.

  3. Says:

    Hey dude… groovy stuff for my collection on this addiction…. shall be sure to drop some love in the next (last?) edition. Speakin o luv..tnx.

    Was going to get the last one out of my system but with the US holiday, and that work thing… figured next week.

    I like the goodies you came up with though… going to have to put a post of links together at the end of this journey…

    Hope yer having a good one… cya on the trails ;0)

  4. Says:

    Good presentation of the blog.As I am in search of information about Google Analytics its very useful to me.

  5. Says:

    @Andrew - hope you had a great thanksgiving too

    @Web Manager- usually the best place to pull city data from is to look at the Map Overview report in GA and that is the values that you want to filter for. So you have to go digging into a report and then you can segment or filter based on that data for next time.

    @Dave - Thanks man. I look forward to reading your next post. You really have GA figured out from a SEO perspective something I really need to spend more time with.

  6. Says:

    Thanks Founderfor writing such a great tutorial.

    Till the time I was not even thing about monitoring email campaign, my analysis was limited to monitor traffic and visitor trend only, you have given me a fair chance to explore Google analytics.

    There are many more people like me who actually do not know the power of Google analytics for free.

  7. Says:

    I was just chatting with my friend about this last week over lunch . Don’t remember how in the world we got on the subject really, they brought it up. I do remember having a excellent chicken salad with ranch on it. I digress…