Google Analytics provides you with the ability to create user defined segmentations but what does that mean for you and how can you use that to help make your business better?

This feature allows you to break your visitors up into groups based on a number of factors including actions they may take on your site, content they may access, or whether or not they have signed up or are a member or not.  This is accomplished by setting a JavaScript variable that creates a cookie on the visitor’s browser.   This visitor’s actions are then associated with that user group the remainder of the session.  The cookie stays set for 2 years so if the visitor comes back within that time period they will remain in that user group.

This code must be called after the main GA tracking code has been called.  You can also place the pageTracker._setVar(“”);  in the main GATC under the initial call to GA.js.

You can access the information associated with these groups by clicking on Visitors >> User Defined.  It will then produce the following report.

You can now easily see the site usage betweens these groups.  Although this particular report is breaking down visitors for a major university by students and Faculty plus a couple more groups, this same strategy can be applied for ecommerce or content delivery websites.  Often times, people find it very beneficial to create groups for members vs. non-members so they can measure the difference in value between these groups.  It may provide you with the statistics to justify additional promotions or user benefits for shifting visitors from one segmentation to another.

For example, if you know that your members access 7 pages per visit whereas non-members may only access on average 3 pages per visit and your site monetization is based on ads then you know pages per view directly correlates with your bottom line.  You can easily contrast the value of the groups and know how much you can offer or spend in order to convert these non-members.

Another great use for this is to set segmentations based on content that is accessed.  If you want to measure the value of a certain video or certain web page that is accessed, you can load the JavaScript tag either on video load, or page load which sets the variable.  You can then either access your reports through the method above or you can use the segmentation feature while on any of the traffic reports.  This will allow you to see the number and actions of visitors from any specific place that accessed the specified criteria. This can help you answer questions like “How much of an impact does this certain marketing page or flash video make on my website.  Does it help convert visitors and most importantly, was it a positive return on my investment?”

As you can imagine, there are several other ways that you can take advantage of this feature to understand your different user groups and while these are some of the most widely used options, understanding segmentations is the first step in creating custom content for better user experiences, higher conversion rates, lower cost per conversions, and ultimately better ROI.

If you have any questions, please let me know.
Thanks,
Brad Henry

For the purpose of this post, I am describing how to track dynamic content from a CMS system using Google Analytics and Event Tracking.

I am tying GA Event Tracking to dynamic promotional areas where the content is pulled from a Pull CMS system and rotated in sequence by an AJAX timer.    The rotating content is mixed text with some graphics and links and the client wants to track content impressions and clicks associated with the relative content depending on which content is being displayed.  All of the content is loaded into the page simultaneously and an AJAX script rotates what is being displayed.     Tricky part is that we can’t tag anything in CMS because the client changes it fairly often and you can’t embed Javascript into the content areas in this CMS.     

The first thing I did was create an Event Tracking Object for this specific dynamic area and loaded it above the dynamic content area.  I then created a function that is called when the timer function completes and displays the first content in the cycle.  The function dynamically determines which content is being displayed by searching the document for the specific div plus an array generated from the timer.  It then appends another function to all the links within that div that loads onclick (Similar to Brian Clifton’s hack for Tracking Outbound Links).  The first function also grabs the content title by id and loads it into the GA ET Label and sends the info to GA as the content rotates.  The issue I found with this is that when you try to put a JavaScript variable or HTML DOM objects into the Event Tracking label, it makes the GA Event tracking just quit.  No errors or anything, the rest of the function just quits which makes it hard to diagnose.  A way around is that ASP variables seem to work just fine so by making the javascript that pulls the title equal an ASP variable, I could then substitute the ASP variable into the label.  Now every time the content rotates, it fires a GA Event Tracking snippet that creates a “Views” action and associates the content’s title as the label.   

In order to track clicks, I use the onclick function that was appended to the links within the div that also uses an array to dynamically determine which content we are on in the cycle and fires the GA ETC with “Clicks” as the action and pulls the ASP variable again as the label.  Now when I go into GA, I can go to the Event Tracking area, view Objects, select the specific object I want and change the “Detail Level” to “Label” versus action and it displays all the dynamic content pieces within that specific Object.  I can then click on each of those and view the “Views” and “clicks” associated with each specific content piece within the given dynamic rotating CMS feature.

I might not have described this process in perfect detail but the logic is somewhat simple, implementation was a little more difficult. Even if the CMS content isn’t being rotated through a timer, you should be able to use a similar approach using Javascript to find the specific div and append either an Event Tracking or pageTracker snippet to track either views or clicks.

If you have any question, feel free to shoot me an email or post it here.

Thanks,

Brad Henry

When using Google Analytics new Event Tracking feature, when you click on an item, it produces an action. The action is then associated with a previously defined object. Each action can also associate a label such as a store or user ID. When you click on the following item it creates a test action called success!

You can see from the below snapshot that it is registering actions called success.  This is just an example but you can apply this to many other applications.  Some of the things I’ve used this in past for are tracking views and clicks of specific objects, banners, and ads.

You can get really creative with this and create new objects based on whatever it is you want to track and input the actions such as views and clicks then associate the average value with either of those.  You can also use it for tracking zip codes or searches people put into an object or search box on your site.  If you have a store finder on your site, you can easily determine how many people access that feature, use the feature, and know which zip codes people are searching for and the number of times for each zip code.  It’s a pretty cool feature that can be used in some creative ways.  Although Google doesn’t want personal information, you could actually use this as a system to collect and store email addresses or any other information you want to track.

This post is dedicated towards testing the ability to segment visitors who submit forms to access specific pages.

I have a situation where a client needs a ton of segmentation and I had an idea to manually tag internal links with campaign names for the internal tracking.   However, I don’t know whether when a visitor clicks on these if they will be tracked as a new visit because the campaign tracking would probably overwrite the utmz cookie but I don’t know how it will treat the other cookies.  I think it would not count the visitor as new but would just segment the visitors who click on the link into that campaign so I could view the activity, goals, and ecommerce of just the visitors who clicked on that internal link.   I am thinking it may be a way around the limited single user defined variable that we currently have.  To test this theory, I am providing a link here that is manually tagged and I will be accessing my site through an obscure method so I can isolate it and then view the results.  So if you want to take part, go ahead and click on the link.

Thanks,

Brad Henry