A national chain of hotels came to us asking for advice on how to improve their PPC program. When we took a look, we almost immediately discovered a serious flaw: they had poured a significant amount of money into their PPC campaign without ever stopping to seriously consider where most of their visitors were coming from. Had they been utilizing Advanced Segments, a tool that was added to Google Analytics within the last several years, they would have found this information extremely easy to obtain and could have targeted their advertising to the areas with the highest chance of success.

Google Analytics has long been a favorite tool of those looking for data on their website traffic. Now Advanced Segmentation makes that data even better by allowing users to easily filter it according to almost any category they want. The tool allows you to hone in on certain trends and behaviors regarding your site’s traffic by using default segments or by creating your own custom segments. Used correctly, the knowledge provided can help you make strategic business decisions to improve your site’s performance. Once the hotel chain made use of Advanced Segments, they were able to determine from which cities their site was getting the most visitors and geo-target those locations (by creating campaigns specific to those cities), ensuring that they were making the most out of their Paid Search budget.

Google Analytics has always allowed users to filter their data, but it was a much trickier process that wasn’t nearly as intuitive or user-friendly. With Advanced Segments, separating your data is as simple as dragging and dropping the filters you want to use. Clicking the Advanced Segments tab in Google Analytics will lead you to a list of the default segment options offered, or to create a segment not offered in the default list, you can choose the metrics and dimensions you want from a comprehensive list provided by Google Analytics.

So what are some examples of how this tool can be used? As we saw with the hotel company, one way to use the feature is to enhance paid search geo-targeting. In Search Engine Optimization, you might use this data to drive localized keyword strategies and/or create geo-specific landing pages for areas that drive significant traffic (or leads) to your website.

Another area where Advanced Segments can come in handy is determining the time(s) of day that your site performs best. You can use this data to day-part PPC efforts (select times of day your text ads will serve impressions) or strategically time Email marketing deployments to touch potential customers during the hours that are historically highest in traffic and conversions.

Of course, these are just a few examples of the many ways Advanced Segments can be used to learn more about the traffic to your website. The increased ease of use created by Advanced Segments makes Analytics an ideal tool for understanding this data. Click here for more information on creating and using advanced segments.

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Tags: paid search, sem, seo, Web Analytics

This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 9:33 am and is filed under Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.