When talking with customers about Google Analytics, you often hear the same thing: “I’m not really using Google Analytics because I don’t know what I’m looking at. It’s just too much”.
And that’s a pity because you can learn a whole lot about your website and your audience with Google Analytics’ data.
So, is there a simple way to use Google Analytics without getting lost?
There might be, by using segments.
What’s a segment?
In Google Analytics a segment is a way to specify the data you’re seeing in every standard view.
Google Analytics just throws it all in there, on one big pile of data.
This means that when you’re looking at a standard view in Google Analytics you see: ‘all sessions of all visitors’, you see: total revenue, all pages, average time on page of all users, the landing pages of all visitors.
You might recognize this: You’re in the Acquisition section and you’re all happy, because you’ve created the perfect table.
You’ve used the advanced filter option to include the Medium: “Organic” and you’re seeing the data you want to see.
Then you think: “I’m curious to see which pages these visitors looked at, let’s take these filters to the next section of Google Analytics.”
You hit the Behavior section and Poof! your filter is gone.
Oh, the frustration!!!
If you want to know which pages people coming from organic search visit, you need to find another way.
A segment helps you to narrow down the aggregated data Google Analytics shows, into data you want to see and need, to answer a specific question you have.
You can use that segment throughout the sections, the segment doesn’t get lost when switching between sections.
For instance, if we want to know which source customers who bought an eBook came from, we can create a segment of people who bought an eBook.
By applying that segment and looking at the Acquisition – Source/Medium section, we can conclude that most of our eBook customers came from a newsletter.
Goodbye frustration!
Why do you need segments?
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