How to Create Advanced Segments

You've installed Google Analytics on your website. Now what will you do with all of this information? Solution- create advanced segments. Advanced segments will help you track the behaviors of the visitors to your site. They're also very useful for tracking your online marketing and advertising efforts. 

For example, there was a spike in your conversions and you want to know what caused them. Setting an advanced segment will help you focus on which advertising or marketing campaign contributed the increase in sales. 

How to Create an Advanced Segment

An advanced segment lets you focus on one area of visitor type, behaviors, and in this example, traffic source- PPC.

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account.

2. Go to the upper right of your dashboard and click All Visits.

3. On the left part of the screen, click the blue link Create a new advanced segment.

4. Under the green dimensions tab, click Traffic Sources.

5. From there, select Medium.

6. Click and drag this Medium box into the box 

7. Name your segment. In the example below, I've named it "PPC". Now click Create Segment and you're ready to apply it to your report.

I am now looking at my reports with my PPC segment turned on.  To learn more about the demographics of my PPC visitors, I can go over to the left to the Visitors report. From here, I can see things like browser and connection speed of my PPC visitors.

Advanced Segments for AdWords Traffic

Why set an AdWords advanced segment? AdWords gives you many tools with which you can monitor and optimize your ads' performance. There's ad scheduling, demographic targeting, and managed placements, just to name a few. Using an advanced segment will help you monitor your AdWords advertising efforts more closely. There are a few ways to find the behavior of your AdWords traffic:

Analytics

1.Set an advanced segment

Using the steps I describe above, set your Source to Google and the Medium to CPC.

2. Day Parts Report

*This is only available if you have destination auto-tagging turned on and your AdWords account is linked to Analytics.

Under Traffic Source, select AdWords. From there, select the Day Parts report. This graph will show you the time of day or day of week your ads were clicked. If you click on a time of day (say, 2:00), you can find the clicks, conversions, bounce rate, etc. for that specific time. Below is the graph by day. 

AdWords Dimensions Tab

The Dimensions tab in AdWords will give you metrics on day parts and conversions, and it will also give you demographic and geographic information on your clicks. 

What to do with Advanced Segment Information

There are many, many things you can do with all the information you gather from advanced segments. These are just a few ways to segment out your traffic to discover how your site and marketing efforts are performing: 

• Use a day part segment to schedule AdWords ads at certain parts of the day to increase ROI.
• Segmenting visitors by location to see if national campaigns are working at a local level.
• Compare engaged vs. nonengaged visitors.
• Compare campaign sources to decide where to allocate marketing and advertising dollars. 

These are just some of the segments that will give you very valuable information. Look for more blog posts from us with more detail on how to analyze the information you gather. 

In the meantime, if you'd like more help with Google Analytics or AdWords managment, please contact Adam Howitt Consulting, Inc. to learn more about our services. 

Check out this post with a little bit more detail on YouTube and a slide presentation on SlideShare.