Do you engage in social media, add SEO-minded keywords to your website, advertise with AdWords, and post or comment on industry blogs or forums, and now you want to know which of your myriad online marketing efforts is producing the most effective results? Enter Google Analytics Advanced Segments.
Advanced Segments allow you to group your traffic by specific data points to determine who’s visiting your site from what source, and what they’re doing. You can filter by traffic source, such as referral address, ad campaign, medium, or search keyword. You can also filter by information about the user, from operating system and screen size, to city and days since last visit.
Creating Advanced Segments is easy – from your Google Analytics dashboard, select Advanced Segments under My Customizations. Then select from one of the default segments or create your own using any number of the 100+ dimensions and metrics. You can apply the segment to any of the sites in your analytics account, or several at once.
You’re given a lot of freedom in creating segments. You can group your traffic by source, and determine which is providing the most and best results. You can group by quality of traffic (such as purchases, time spent on the site, etc) and see which of those categories your various sources tend to fall into. Additionally, you can filter both at the same time, to create segments divided by source that only contain valuable traffic, making it even easier to compare.
