Advanced Segmentation: You Have More Data Than You Think You Do
Have you recently added a great new tool to your website? Chances are good that this will bring in more visitors and increase their interaction with your site. But you don’t want to assume that it will happen just because your new feature is out there. Along with marketing the new tool, you also need to measure its success. And thanks to Google’s advanced segmentation, you can do this easily.
Let’s use a fictitious company as an example. Products Galore recently released a feature on their site allowing users to filter products by category, color, size and more. The overall goal of adding the product filtering tool was to sell 7% more product online. It stands to reason that sales might go up if it’s easier for customers to find the exact product they want. But just because sales go up doesn’t mean it’s a result of the new product filtering tool. And there are too many option combinations within the tool to simply break out the usage by each option selected. So how can Products Galore specifically measure how much of the sales increase is due to the new tool?
First, they’ll set up event tracking in Google Analytics, designating each time that the submit button on the filtering form is executed as an “event.” This lets them understand the number of times users interact with the filter and the number of unique users.
Once that is in place, they can create an advanced segment (as shown below) to segment only those who have used the tool.
Then they can simply go to the goal of a purchase and compare it to users who have not interacted with the filtering tool. Let’s say that Products Galore looks at the results of that comparison and sees, for example, that product filtering tool users are currently outperforming non-users by roughly 5%. Though this is a nice sales increase, it isn’t the 7% that Products Galore desired. Now that they know this, they can dive deeper into the metrics for further insights about other factors they can adjust to boost sales the additional 2%.
But the point here is that, thanks to Google Analytics’ advanced segmentation, in just a few minutes we were able to identify a high-level custom engagement metric that lets Products Galore find out if the tool is performing to their expectations.
What this means in practical terms is that more data is probably available to you than you realize, and this data can help you further understand the relative return on investment of any new toolset or campaign.
Next time you launch a new feature, tool or campaign, remember to set the right tracking (or ask your agency to do it for you). Even if you are not in an eCommerce business, this kind of tracking can help you further identify what is working best to convert your visitors online – and increase your overall value in the digital space.
