Google analytics segmentation

I try to write posts that will be relatable regarding the size of your company/eCommerce, since I’m working in a huge company – and that is where I get my experience, and most of my inspiration – I understand that some posts might not be that relevant for everyone. For example, the Business Impact Analysis is exponentially more important the bigger your organization is (IMO). You should definitely do it even if you are working in a small company, but it might not be necessary to do it as structured as I have described.

But this subject, user behavior types, this is something everyone need to understand and set up, no matter the size of your site or company.

The principle is simple – not everyone has the same goal with their visit to your site, therefore you can’t measure an average.

Let’s take a sites search function as an example.

User A goes to IKEA.se looking for a table, knowing that they want the “Ängsö” table. They search for “Ängsö”, finds it and buys it. The session takes 30seconds and the visitor visits 5 pages.

User B goes to IKEA.se not sure what they want. They both search and browse, finding a few products, some inspiration and is generally pleased with their visit. The visits take 11 minutes and the visitor visits 25 pages

Now, if you measure how good your search is based on search -> conversion User B will be counted as a bad search – which it shouldn’t be.

And let’s say that your site only has two visits, User A and User B, when you look at the average time on site that will be 5,65min and average page views will be 15.

That information is basically useless. What you want to know in this case is how good is my site for visits that know what they want and have the intent on buying something and how good is my site for people looking for inspiration and browsing.

It might be that when you track the User B you find that they would benefit from finding links to inspiration directly on the product card instead of clicking themselves to another menu and then finding the product area they were looking for.

And in User A’s case, they will have widely different needs.

Now, these two visits can be the exact same person, just visiting the site in two different mindsets – and if you are visiting my blog, you probably have a large enough site for average measurement to be irrelevant.

At my work we have two different segment groups, one with four different customer behaviors where the user searches for products, not necessarily buying them, but they are visiting our site with non-administrative intent. One of the segments might do both admin things and search in the same visit. The other group are those visiting our site with only admin tasks in mind.

In my opinion this is an often overlooked part of analyzing customers, both in behaviors but also in pricing and marketing. And it is vital to segement your data regardless what you measure if you are a medium or bigger company, otherwise you will get misleading averages that in best case scenarios tell you less than they could and in worst case scenarios leads decisions being taken based on false pretenses.

So, now you are probably wondering how do I do my segmentations?

We started by hiring a company that did a survey so that we could identify what kind of behaviors we had – in hindsight that was a mistake.

Surveys are good for certain things, but in this case we have all the data in Google Analytics and can see for ourselves where the different behaviors are, which is a much better way. Odds are that you and your customers have different views on what is an admin function and what is not, certain behaviors or functions might be very important for you to measure but for the customer it’s an obvious thing/function to do and therefore they won’t think about it in an interview.

Use the data you have. Experiment with the segmentation, see what patterns you find. The most important thing is that there is a big difference in the behaviors, preferably as big as possible. And don’t aim for 100% of the visits and 100% of the revenue, if you only can segment in a way that will cover 70-80% with segments that makes sense, that is good enough.

I’m not going to go into more detail on what segmentations to do, they are to specific to your site, but if you want to know how to set up segmentations in GA check out this post where i cover the basics.

Setting up segmentations in Google Analytics for different User Behaviors (comming soon)