Goal completion tracking is the ultimate way of measuring online success, it can be sale, sign-up, engagement or even abandonment. Number of goal completions is not just a figure, it’s what we can use to find insights to obtain better outcomes. Many people are still just comparing number of goal completions month by month or day by day, but they are yet to know where has to be improved. So how can we determine the goals value in an effective way?My answer is: Advanced Segmentation.
google analytics advanced segmentation
One of my clients has multiple ads running on Facebook, Google Adwords and it also has a large amount of traffic from Google organic search. How would I tell them the performance of ads? Maybe just number of goal completions of each day or each month? NO, if I do that, I won’t be able to tell where we should improve, whether is ad not attractive enough, or the landing page sucks or anything else. Apart from that, customer behaviors are totally distinguishing on different sources, segmenting the goals data can help understand those behaviors and hence find better solutions.
Here are the steps of setting up advanced segmentation of goals (take my client’s data as example)
1. Go to Advanced Segments and create a new advance segment
Simply choose “Goal Completion” from Metrics. Here I only have one goal set up for this client, and it is sign-up. More metrics will be introduced into custom reporting later in this post.
Now we have a graph, this will give you a basic idea of how many times that goals have been completed Vs. total visits over defined period. This graph is almost useless to you, but it will be eye-catching at the top in your report.
Below the graph in Google Analytics, some tasty data is laid out nicely, this is exactly what you want. From the data, I can see Facebook Ad is doing pretty bad in terms of attracting people to sign up. Only 1 out of 300 actually signed up, even though it’s a branding ad. (Note: I generated a tagged URL for facebook ad landing page to differentiate visits from natural facebook traffic. So its source is indicated as banner.)
In order to attract more people from Facebook Ad to sign up, the solution can be
- Design a dedicated landing page for Facebook Ads, emphasize the benefits of signing up
- Improve Facebook Ad Copy to focus on signing up rather than branding
But is it enough yet to understand the performance via different sources? No, not even close to it. For better understanding, more insights and conclusions, we need more data. Thereby, custom reporting is what we have to do next.
2. Create new custom report, more segments you have, more insights you generate.
Goal completions are not the only data that we want, any data associated with performing will be extremely helpful. Take few examples, visit depth, bounce rate, % new visits…etc. So set up a new custom report with the data you feel important, data can be specific to cities, keywords in organic searching, literally anything, don’t limit your imagination.
Once report is created, analyse the data, aren’t they delicious? For Google and direct traffic, customers spent similar amount of time on site, while comparing to Facebook customers, they only spent 1/4 of time. Percentages of new visitors are even more interesting, direct traffic had actually beaten google search by nearly 5%, does this mean branding campaign worked better than google search? Goal conversion rate of direct traffic is 50% higher than Google search, maybe we should invest more on branding campaigns? Per Visit Goal Value is extremely important to campaign success, but due to complexity of this client’s online marketing measurement, they haven’t offered an accurate value of goal (sign up). Goal abandonment is yet another key to understand goal performance, if abandonment is too high, we need to check which part of registering process had driven customers away.
3. Create more custom reports with different metrics
Different industries and companies should have different data segmentation to measure online success. At first stage, just create as many segments and custome reports as y0u can. Then analyse them, once you’ve found out those reports who provide value to your business, stick with them, dump the useless ones. After certain period, you will be able to find more and more insights and solutions, that is, more success.
What’s your best practice of goal completion segmention or data segmetation? I would love to hear your experience.
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- 5 things you could mess up Google Analytics data
- How to find paid search keywords that customers really use
- Nedstat Web Analytics Series 1 – Use Direct View To Determine Customer Behavior
- Is Google intrusive in the sense of collecting user data?
- Click through data now available in Google Webmaster Tools
