According to BuiltWith, more than 27 million live websites are currently using Google Analytics. The secret of such popularity is the app’s ability to provide users with helpful stats and metrics that define how their website/business perform and, therefore, allowing to make improvements and adjustments.
One way in which Google Analytics help entrepreneurs to improve the performance of their online business is using conversion segments. These could be amazingly helpful because they generate the information required to achieve specific business goals. For example, let’s suppose you need to find out how many visitors come to your website from Facebook. This important stat can help you define the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and, of course, can be generated using an appropriate segment.
In other words, Google Analytics allows you to get those precious insights into the performance of your business initiatives that you need to reach the ultimate goal of growth.
Now, let’s give you an overview of some of the specific ways in which Segments can be a powerful tool for boosting conversions.
How to Improve Conversions with Smart Segmentation
1. Find the Best-Performing Marketing Channels
To maximize your marketing results, you need to know a simple thing: what’s working and what’s not. Fortunately, Google Analytics can help you with that. By creating segments for different data channels, you can get an overview of their performance and, therefore, understand what you need to focus on to get better results.
For example, a close look at segmented data channels may reveal that a certain marketing effort is working much more than others because it attracts a lot of traffic and conversions.
If you, for example, discover that Organic search traffic has a higher conversion rate than Paid search traffic, then you should definitely invest more in content marketing and reassess your paid marketing strategy. This means that you may have to improve the quality of content by investing in localization and personalization (look for reliable localization services on review platforms like PickWriters).
You don’t even need to create any new segments to achieve this goal because Google Analytics comes with a number of out-of-the-box segments such as those included in the image below.
To create a new segment and start collecting data, you’ll need to click on the “New Segment” button on the upper left side of the window. Once you did it, you’ll discover a lot of options to select from. This is why we love Google Analytics so much.
2. Build Tailored Segments for Your Campaigns by Using Geolocation Data
Visitor segmentation on the basis of their geographic location is without a doubt the most popular method of segmentation. While it doesn’t deliver advanced personalization, it’s nevertheless useful for businesses targeting customers in a specific country or area.
To build this new segment, you need to click on the abovementioned “New Segment” button and select the appropriate options in the “Location” subsection.
As a result, you’ll segment your visitors on the basis of their location. If you’re targeting a specific country, then you’ll be able to show them a customized message to confirm that you ship to their area.
This is needed to let the visitor know that he or she won’t face any unnecessary difficulties with deliveries, which increases their confidence to proceed to the product [AK1] catalog. An online fashion seller Rue La La, for example, lets the visitors know that they ship to their countries right away.
So, by segmenting your visitors this way, you can make appropriate changes such as shipping to create more personalized and relevant offers.
3. Segmentation by Traffic Source / Referrer
Segmenting your visitors by this indicator may reveal the differences among their journeys through the site as well as the business value they bring. Google Analytics allows finding out whether visitors found you via source, campaign, medium, or keyword.
Activating this segment and analyzing traffic sources is a great way to learn about your target audience and define which sources bring you the most revenue. This information can help you to find out where to maximize your effort and how to optimize your website to produce more conversions.
4. Cross/UpSell in Shopping Cart
Forrester Research claims that upselling and cross-selling strategies are responsible for 10-30 percent of eCommerce business revenues. This means that you should also use them.
The fact that a customer has added a product to cart means that you have an opportunity for an upsell. For example, you can try to increase the monetary value of their order by offering to order more to reach a free shipping/discount threshold or sharing other products that may be good for them based on what they’ve added to the cart.
One way to do that is to create a sequence segment in Google Analytics that allows combining one or multiple specific behaviors such as viewing a product page and traits such as a location, into one filter. Here’s how to do it:
- Create a new segment
- Click on the Advanced option under segment categories and then go to Sequences
- There, you must configure a step using the following sequence: Include > Sessions > Any user interaction
- Choose “Page” option to include the link to the cart page.
- Add the second step and click on the “Add” button which is shown in the image above on the right.
- Make sure that “is followed by” option remains selected
- Choose Event Action and specify the name for the event (e.g. “Added product”)
- Create the third step and make sure that it mirrors the first step.
Don’t forget to save the segment. Now, you have a great tool to encourage more people to buy from you.
5. Segmentation by Landing Pages
The next segmentation on our list relates to customer behavior on your website. To find how many people have visited landing pages on your website through organic search (which is very important in terms of measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns), you need to add a new segment for Organic Traffic (don’t forget to delete a default “Organic Traffic” segment because it shows stats on total traffic).
By applying that segment and clicking on Behavior – Site Content – Landing Pages, you can find out the non-paid search traffic on landing pages that are relevant to the keywords you’re using in your campaigns.
By analyzing the ones that attracted the most traffic, you can get an idea on how to improve new and existing landing pages that don’t perform well. Besides, you can also define possible mistakes that prevent landing pages from achieving their goals, e.g. poorly optimized content, unengaging content, etc.
Using Segments in Google Analytics to Boost Conversions
Using segments is a must if you want to boost conversions and positively impact your business’ bottom line. With over 27 million websites using Google Analytics, it is a no brainer to use segmentation and get more value out of this tool.
We have only touched on a few ways in which you can use Segments in Google Analytics.
To discover more ideas like –
- Custom segments for different age groups to see which pages they visit most and how long they stay on your website
- Segments for specific audiences you are targeting on LinkedIn or Facebook
- Creating custom segments for campaigns you are tracking with UTM parameters
you can visit the Google Analytics Custom Solutions Gallery. Import and modify the solutions you find there to work for your business objectives.