I’ve been consulting with an on online retailer to set up an online marketing strategy to reach qualified customers in a specific geographic location. One of the first things I did for my client was an in-depth analysis of their website statistics to better understand this audience segment.
For those of you using Google Analytics, this is pretty easy to do just by setting up an “Advanced Segment” within your Google Analytics account. For my client, we were able to look more closely at visitors from the targeted geographic area who had a revenue value of $200 or more. We also compared the conversion performance of these visitors from different traffic sources including PPC, organic, and referrals.
Benefits of Advanced Segments
Some of the benefits of using Advanced Segments in Google Analytics include:
Ease in setting up segments that are then able to be applied to many different data reports within your Google Analytics account.
All segments created are able to be saved within your profile so you can easily access them later to analyze performance.
Ability to easily compare multiple segments right next to each other (you can compare up to 4 segments at a time).
After conducting this analysis, we learned that visitors from our geotargeted location had converted at a higher rate from certain keyword searches and were more frequently driven to our site from several key referring blogs. This information allowed us to optimize our PPC campaign more effectively for this geographic region and also gave us good data to go back to our referring site partners to obtain better sponsorships and placement opportunities.
How do you set up Advanced Segments in Google Analytics?
In the example above, we wanted to find out more about customers that came to the site and spent more than $200 (“top users”). In order to set up this Advanced Segment in Google Analytics, we did the following:
First, set up the new Advanced Segment by going to the Google Analytics Dashboard and clicking on the drop down next to “Advanced Segments” on the right side of the page.
On the next screen, select the link “Create a new advanced segment”
In the “Dimension” and “Metrics” boxes on the left hand side, choose “Revenue” and drag it over to the “dimension or metric” box on the center of the page. If you have trouble finding “revenue” dimension, type “revenue” into the search box above.
Under “condition” leave the value at “greater than” and input a numeric value of “200″
Name this new segment (i.e. Visits where more than $200 spent) in the box below and click “Create Segment” button.
You now have a new segment created so you can view website activity for those visitors who have spent more than $200 on your website. To see keyword activity, go to the Traffic Sources report and click on “Keywords”. Within the Advanced Segments drop down menu which is located at the top right of the page, above the graph, you will now see a segment named “Visits where more than $200 spent” under the “Custom Segments” box. Check the box next to this segment and then click the “Apply” button.
To learn how to segment your Social Media traffic using a dimension with a RegEx value in a new Advanced Segment, stay tuned.
An email I received recently from LinkedIn was a great reminder to me that I need to keep better track of where my connections are working now and be more proactive in staying in touch. It appears that many of my connections have moved on to new jobs in 2010.
If you’re looking for a new job in 2011, you should definitely check out LinkedIn’s new resume builder at http://resume.linkedinlabs.com. This new LinkedIn tool allows you to turn your LinkedIn profile into a perfect resume in just a matter of seconds. You choose a resume template you like and then customize the content. Once you’re done, you are ready to export your resume as a PDF, print it, or share a link to it via email, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
Thanks for the update, LinkedIn. For additional information on the new resume builder, check out the LinkedIn blog.
Tracking your Google AdWords Campaign Data in your Google Analytics Account
Linking your Google Analytics account to your Google AdWords PPC campaign allows you to track some rich data about your PPC campaign performance beyond just CTR and CPC, including paid search visitor geographic data, content preferences, bounce rates, and other engagement metrics.
Setting this up is pretty straight forward if you are using the same email address to log into both your AdWords and your Analytics accounts.
Step 1: Begin by making sure you have “auto-tagging” enabled within your Google AdWords account. While auto tagging is typically “on” by default, you’ll just want to go into your AdWords account preferences and make sure auto tagging is enabled. If disabled, just reactivate it in your account.
What is autotagging?
When you enable “auto tagging” under your account preferences in AdWords, Google will begin appending unique ?gclid parameter on your destination URLs. The gclid is a unique tracking parameter to pass information between Google AdWords and Google Analytics. However, you will not see this appended URL parameter in your ad destination URL since it is a URL redirect, but you will see the appended URL in your web server logs.
Step 2: Still in your AdWords account, click on the “reporting” tab and choose “Analytics”.
Step 3: Choose the selection: “I already have a Google Analytics account.”
Step 4: From the Existing Google Analytics Account drop down menu, choose the name of the Analytics account you’d like to link to. Then select “link account” and you are all set.
If you do not see your Analytics account in the drop down menu in Step 4, you may need to first add your Google AdWords username to your existing Google Analytics account. This can be done by going into your Google Analytics and then adding an admin to the account with this username.
One item to note: For anyone who is interested in tracking “search query data” as opposed to just keyword data, Google Adwords and Google Analytics integration does eliminate your visibility into search query data. Therefore the clicks and conversions from your PPC campaign will be associated with the keyword within your AdWords account only, not the actual search query the user entered. I will be writing a future post about this issue but you should be aware of this as well.
