Google Analytics is a fantastic, enterprise grade analytics programme that features great advanced functionality. We’ve already explored the importance of using analytics to understand how your visitors are interacting with your website and how you can use this information to improve your site’s usability and maximise conversion. Today, we’d like to look at this in a little more detail.

Among Google Analytics’ great features for even better analysis of your data is Advanced Segments. Essentially, segments allow you to easily isolate and analyse specific, defined sections of your traffic side by side.

At the top of the dashboard you can easily activate pre-defined Advanced Segments by using the drop-down on the top right hand side of the screen (in the grey bar). By selecting any number of the default segments, you’re able to compare these metrics next to each other on your reports. And, as you move around in your reports, these segments will remain in place allowing you to extract more meaningful analysis from your analytics data.

The pre-defined segments include a number of useful everyday metrics such traffic sources, paid and non-paid traffic, visits with conversions and non-bounce visits.

But, as they say on the home shopping channels, “that’s not all!” Can’t find the segment you’re looking for? Or want to define a segment even further? No problem!

Click on “create a new advanced segment”, or click on “Advanced Segments” in the My Customizations menu. Here you will be able to create a new segment by simply dragging and dropping dimensions and metrics into the fields around the “and”/”or” statements. You then specify conditions and values for each and test the segment to see the number of visitors to which these specified rules apply.

Once you’re happy with your segment you can name it and save it. Now you’re able to easily select it from the list and apply it to any one of your reports.

How can you apply this on a practical level? Let’s say you run an African travel website and you’re interested in seeing which destinations are most popular on your website. The first step would be to check if there are any unique identifiers in your URLs for these pages. If the URLs use variables as unique identifiers, say “country=botswana”, “country=southafrica” and “country=namibia” – then you’re in business! Note what these are.

In your advanced segments tab, click “create new advanced segment”. Drag the “Page” dimension (from the Content section of the menu) into the field. Select the condition “contains” and select the appropriate value for the identifier. Test the segment to see that it’s working. Name the segment appropriately and save it. Do the same for each of the destinations you want to segment.

Now, you are able to apply these custom advanced segments to your reports to compare data such as visits to each section, bounces, pageviews and new visits for each segment side by side.

Advanced segments are also particularly useful if you’re looking to analyse purchasing behaviour. It’s possible, for example, to segment visitors from specific cities or regions who made a purchase on your site. You can then more easily see what products and pages these people looked at, this may give you a better understanding of where to focus your marketing efforts.

Last year Google announced a nifty new feature to Google Analytics called Benchmarking. Benchmarking allows you to compare your website to similar-sized websites in the same industry vertical. Websites are grouped based on the number of visitors they receive and are classified as small, medium or large.

You can only view statistics for websites of a similar size to yours, for instance if you have a medium-sized website you can only view benchmarking data for medium-sized websites. In any given vertical there are a minimum of 100 websites participating and their information is used to aggregate the benchmarking data for that specific vertical. Below are some of the areas for which benchmarking data is available:

• The number of visitors over a certain time period to your website compared to the average number of visits to similar-sized websites during the same period
• Your website’s bounce rate compared to other websites of a similar size
• The number of page views your website received over a certain time period compared to the number of page views of similar sized websites over the same period
• The average time visitors spent on your website in relation to competitor websites
• The number of new visitors to your website compared to the number of new visitors to competing websites

In order to have access to the benchmarking feature you have to opt-in and share your data with Google. Google removes all information that can be used to identify your website and your data is combined with hundreds (or even thousands) of other anonymous websites in your vertical. This information is then made available to all participants and allows website owners to identify potential opportunities by allowing them to analyse trends in their and other industries. Very handy indeed!

The importance of having a well-designed and user-friendly website has been highlighted many times, yet once the website design and development processes are complete, that’s really only the beginning! Maintaining a website requires a constant investment of time and effort and in our opinion a website should always be regarded as “a work in progress”.

It is important to measure what happens on your website; for instance how visitors find it, where they enter the website and how they engage with your content and navigation. To measure these actions easily, web marketers make use of analytics programmes like Google Analytics.

One of the main benefits of web analytics is that it helps website owners gain a better understanding of what visitors want by analysing their actions on the website. Among other things, Analytics will show you:

• The source of your traffic; for instance direct traffic, traffic from search engines or referring websites
• The average amount of time visitors spent on the website
• Visitor loyalty (whether the majority of visits are new or returning)
• Your most popular content
• Geographic locations of your visitors with a map overlay that shows where in the world visitors are accessing your website
• You will also be able to see technical details such as which are the most commonly used Internet browsers, or the connection speed of your visitors

The above mentioned are just a few of the aspects of a website that can be measured. Analytics will highlight the areas on a website that can be improved (i.e. pages with a high exit rate) and areas that are performing well. As part of an optimisation strategy Analytics will point out which keywords are performing well. This information can be used to increase organic traffic to the website.

Since Analytics is focused on measuring user engagement, it is important to allocate goals to your website. Goals can include visitors filling in a contact form, downloading a brochure, signing up for a newsletter and so forth. The conversion rate indicated the percentage of visitors to a website that complete an assigned goal or task. As such, it’s an important benchmark used to show a site’s effectiveness.

Within Google Analytics there is a very useful and insightful benchmarking function (found under the Visitors tab) that allows website owners to compare their website to similar-sized websites in the same industry. Comparison criteria include visits, bounce rate, page views, average time on the website, number of pages visited and new visits.

Essentially, Analytics will help you improve your website on a continuous basis to provide your visitors with the best content and usability in order to increase conversions. Do you have questions about Analytics? Ask us, we offer one-on-one or team Analytics training on request.