Advanced Segments in Google Analytics for E-commerce

With the current economic climate the way it is businesses need to be strict on how and where they spend their advertising budget. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the most effective forms of digital advertising especially for e-commerce businesses today.

With these budgets in mind the customer needs to be able to see where they are receiving the greatest return on their investment from their advertising across their site. For large e-commerce SEO campaigns across static pages, categories and even product pages standard reporting cannot always provide you with enough detailed information to do this. So, how can we break it down into manageable, detailed data to show where the best return is? We use default segments and create advanced segments within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics segments can divide various metrics of data to a particular page or across the site. Google provide default segments that can help to break this data down which currently covers the following:

All Visits
New Visitors
Returning Visitors
Paid Search Traffic
Non Paid Search Traffic
Direct Search Traffic
Referral Traffic
Visits With Conversions
Visits With Transactions
Mobile Traffic
Non Bounce Visits.

When you use a default segment it changes all of the data fed back by Analytics so when you view any form of data from Audience, Advertising, Traffic Sources, Content or Conversions it has been broken down to the data only from the segment that you have chosen.

In most circumstances this is enough data for you to use, although with larger more complex campaigns you need to create custom segments. To select a default segment go to Google Analytics and Overview, under the Audience Tab and at the top of the page you will see advanced segments, choose one or more of these and off you go.

I hope this blog post is of use, have a play and look at you analytics data using default segments. See how you get on and come back to read my next post on how to set up Custom Advanced Segments in Google Analytics.