Target Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation Users

Google Analytics just launched a series of new features. One of the most talked-about upgrades is the ability to create on-the-fly segments and understand the different behavior metrics for each of these segments. Avinash Kaushik, the Google Analytics evangelist, recently posted an article on his blog - http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/google-analytics-releases-ad... - discussing the new segmentation feature and giving us some examples on how to use it.

Avinash exemplifies the segmenting feature by creating a branded keyword segment, where he creates a segment based on the "avinash" keyword:



He then talks about the types of analysis he can perform based on this segment:

For example you could go in and see what content (pages) do people who come on Brand Keywords consume. What products do they buy? If I were GM then which product brochures do the download? On a tech support site did they find the right tech support answer?

Why not segment content and/or ads for this segment?

• What products do they buy? How about cross-selling? Create a bucket based on product purchases and offer products and/or service offerings based on the other purchase.
• If I were GM then which product brochures do the download? Once the user downloaded the brochure, offer a free test drive on the GM home-page to these users.
• On a tech support site did they find the right tech support answer? If they didn’t – and they are lost on the site, open a pop-up (DHTML of course) with a chat session offering help to the user.

We can do this with BTBuckets, we can create a bucket for users searching for Avinash. Here is a capture of how the cluster rules configuration would look like:



We are considering just the three major search engines, but feel free to include others.

Avinash then goes on to say to analyze a different segment – the exact opposite: non-branded keywords. We can also create a segment for this, by simply changing the last condition to AND NOT:



Use this information for custom content!

Avinash then goes on to segment your precious customers – the 'whale customers'. Where he defines these customers:

What you want to do is identify Valuable Customers (after they buy from you they move from Visitors to Customers, yea!), and learn something from them. One easy way to do that is to find the "whales". I am going to use the number of items that Customers purchased on my website as a proxy for "whales". I want everyone who bought more than three things.

In BTBuckets, we can create two different buckets that we want to target:

• users who did more than three purchases on your site
• users who purchased more than three products with their purchase

To target the first type of behavior (users who did more than three purchases on your site), we must create a bucket that saw the purchase confirmation page url with frequency of at least 4. In this case, let's assume the URL is purchase_confirmation.jsp:



For the second targeting behavior (users who purchased more than three products with their purchase), users that made a purchase with more than three products, and we must add a couple of steps for this configuration.

FIRST:
We must make sure that the BTBuckets tag receives the information of product quantity that is being included in the Google Analytics tags. We must then add the following javascript code to the purchase confirmation page where x is the product quantity for that order (make sure this code is placed after the BTBuckets tag):

<script type="text/javascript">   $BTB.trackArea("quantity=x");
</script>

SECOND:
Create a regular expression in the BTBuckets rule box for users who purchased more than 3 products the parameter sent to BTBuckets (which looks for a number between 4 and 999): quantity=(4{1,2}|9{1,3}|[0-9]{2,3}). Here is how the rule would look like in BTBuckets (notice that we are using Area Name for this bucket):



Now, go target your users! Start by integrating these clusters with your adserver and create specific banners for these crowds.

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Please leave comments on how you are using Google Analytics to segment your visitors and BTBuckets to target these behaviors!