Digging for Gold - Google Analytics Custom Segments

Do you know where your clients come from?  Which ones deliver the most conversions, or stay on your site the longest?  Most of my ecommerce clients have geographic "hot spots" - States or metro areas that deliver the bulk of their revenue.   So, we really need to keep a close watch on those visitor segments - something that isn't always easy when managing large PPC campaigns with dozens of campaigns and tens of thousands of keywords.

Google Analytics Custom Segments to the rescue!  By creating custom segments in Analytics, we can quickly isolate just the traffic from one state or a combination of states and watch traffic trends, bounce rates, conversion rates, etc.  Segments also allow us to keep an eye on all our "cse" medium traffic (comparison shopping engines) like Google Shopping, Shopzilla, BizRate, Nextag, Bing Shopping, etc.  simply by pulling down our pre-defined advanced segment called "CSE Traffic".

We can quickly see if there are any drop offs or spikes in traffic, how this segment relates to other segments or "all visits", etc.  It's a real time saver.

Advanced segments are not only useful for zeroing in on specific traffic sources and visitor types, but also important landing pages of your website.   There is almost no limit to the custom combinations that can be created with segments. 

Happy analyzing!

ROI of the Return Visitor

PPC managers are driven by ROI.  We manage all facets of paid search to measurable return on investment.  If a keyword or adgroup fails to perform to a specific ROI, it risks elimination from the campaign. 

Personally, I spend hours per day immersed in Analytics data evaluating every element of my clients' campaigns.  I love to uncover the story of the data, especially the story of the Return Visitor.

Using Analytics' "visitor type" attribution, I can assess whether a keyword that appears to be under-performing actually just needs more time to deliver.   Let's say my client's visitor ratio is typically 75% New vs. 25% Return.  Using the "site usage" tab, I identify keywords with bounce rates or time on site metrics that are weaker than the site average.  By drilling into each keyword and selecting "visitor type" from the Dimension drop-down, I can see how many of the visits attributed to the keyword are return visitors. If the return visitor metrics for time on site, pages viewed, and ROI, are acceptable, the keyword is preserved.  If not, it is removed - but only after it has been active for an amount of time equivalent to the typical conversion cycle for the particular client.

It is imperative that we understand the average buying cycle for our client's products and be aware of the impact that the return visitor has on transactions and revenue.  The following image illustrates that even though return visitors for this particular client only represent 25% of visits this past month, they have driven 79% of revenue.  (click on image for larger version)

Google Analytics Campaign Attribution

To ensure that your PPC campaigns are receiving full conversion credit in Google Analytics, be sure to tag your destination URLS with the code:  utm_nooverride=1

This tag will prevent a return visitor's conversion from being attributed to "direct" if, after originally visiting from a paid ad, they return directly or from another source.    Proper tagging will also help synch conversion tracking between AdWords and Analytics reports.

If you're currently using Google's auto-tagging feature and your current destination URL is http://www.mysite.com, the new URL should read http://www.mysite.com?utm_nooverride=1

Manual utm tags can follow the nooverride tag.