Using Visitor Segmentation in Web Analytics

By Dan S. Robbins

If you're using web analytics to determine the success of your online and offline marketing efforts, you already know: when it comes down to it, it's specific visitor groups, not the aggregate numbers that are important to understand. If you're not segmenting your visitors—or not using web analytics at all, you're flying blind (read: throwing money down the drain).

Simply looking at how all of your traffic behaves in aggregate is an ineffective approach to understanding what is, or isn't working for your web site. To really gain an understanding of who your visitors are and how they behave, and to be able to react accordingly, you must group visitors into segments that make sense for the marketing activities that you're trying to measure.

Divide and Conquer
If your current analytics tool of choice doesn't segment your traffic, add one to your arsenal that does. Great web analytics tools can be had for free and go up in price from there. The right choice for you depends greatly on your business.

Choose a web analytics tool that allows you to easily segment users by many different criteria, like: 'had a certain URL parameter' or 'entered on a certain page' (great for tracking offline programs). Segmenting your audience in this way will provide you with data that allows you to optimize your online presence and combining criteria will provide you with a more finely tuned picture. Knowing when to continue with an activity that works and when to kill those that don't is the key to success.

The possibilities for visitor segmentation are vast—in this article I'll focus on three important segments: online campaign tracking, pay-per-click (PPC) vs. organic search and how to track offline ad campaigns.

Online Campaign Tracking
Whether you're running email campaigns, banners, or text ads to get the most out of this metric, you'll need to assign each creative a unique parameter at the end of your destination URL (i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/?source=yourad). This is an elementary online marketing tactic, but you'd be amazed at how many out there are spending a good amount of their marketing budget—especially on paid search—and are not using tracking parameters in their links.

Once your campaign is live, you can start to look at how visitors that clicked through behave and see the effectiveness by analyzing those who came in on a specific URL parameter and submitted a form or made a purchase.

In the absence of a conversion event look at the segment's average time on site to gauge how interested these visitors are in your product or service. A shorter time on site often stems from no correlation between the ad that was clicked and the page the visitor then sees. Make sure that if your ad says "MP3 Players 30% Off," that your landing page makes this offer very obvious to the visitor.

Organic Search vs. Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Segmenting organic (or regular) search visitors from those who arrived as a result of an ad click-through can highlight differences in behavior that allows you to make better search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) decisions.

Let's say for example that for a certain keyphrase visitors tend to spend less time if they arrived as the result of your PPC campaign than if they came through on the organic listing. This information should drive you analyze your SEO efforts for that term and delve further into the campaigns that you're running against it.

In the case of the organic search results, depending on your ranking, you'll either want to work to move up in the results for the keyphrase or if you're already ranking number one, be sure not to do anything that will result in a lower ranking.

For the PPC campaign, you'll want to determine if it is really a poorly performing ad or not. Just because you have higher time on site and conversion with the organic results visitors, doesn't mean that isn't yielding a high return on ad spend (ROAS). If the campaign is truly not performing for you, explore how you can optimize the ad, landing page or both. The other option is to just kill the campaign altogether.

Offline Ad Campaign Tracking
Analyzing offline campaigns using web analytics is often overlooked. You can track effectiveness when driving traffic to your website in print or some type of broadcast media by creating unique landing pages for each campaign (i.e. yoursite.com/specialoffer).

To measure an offline campaign, create a visitor segment for all traffic that enters on the unique landing page for that campaign. Then use the same practice mentioned earlier of combing that criterion with one that reflects a conversion gain further knowledge of its performance.

Once you've written your ad copy and have a destination URL, don't forget to have that landing page tested and live on your site before the ad hits the street.

Segmentation Boundaries Don't Stop Here
The range of segments that you can create and combine in a sophisticated web analytics tool is vast. Hopefully, the few examples provided in this article serve as a launch pad for your own visitor segmentation activities.

Published in Small Business Technology Magazine, April 2007.