Hack48.Segment Visitors to Understand Specific Group Activity

Hack 48. Segment Visitors to Understand Specific Group Activity

Web visitors are complex creatures, and each has slightly different behaviors and goals. Visitor segmentation is a popular strategy to differentiate these groups and develop a deeper understanding of your audience.

Different visitors come to your web site for different purposes. Some come to your web site to read your content, evaluate your offerings, or make purchases. Others come looking for employment opportunities or investment information. Still others may be looking for customer support. The behavior of these distinct groups will vary a great deal, as should your goals for their membership. For example, if a web measurement report told you that only one percent of your total visitors complete an important task, you may think that your web site is failing miserably. However, if you segment your visitors, focusing only on visitors who respond to a targeted email campaign, you may find that 30 percent of these visitors complete the task.

Given differences in browsing habits and ultimate goals, it certainly makes sense to leverage your measurement toolset to segment visitors in meaningful ways and create different sets of metrics for each. Fortunately, many of the top web measurement vendors offer some type of visitor segmentation tools that provide for differentiation of visitors (Figure 3-13).

3.13.1. Examples of Visitor Segments

No two web sites are likely to benefit from the exact same visitor segments; different analysts will use different criteria to examine the same behaviors, drawing different conclusions. It is likely that the segments you're interested in will change over time as your understanding of your audience evolves. Visitor segments are typically very specific to individual businesses.

Figure 3-13. Visitor segmentation

That said, keep the following in mind as you brainstorm possible segments:

• Your site's varying constituencies (such as buyers, support customers, or tire kickers)

• The different information you offer to each of your constituencies (such as conversion reports, KPIs, lists of pages viewed, or referring domains)

• The various marketing campaigns you run to attract new visitors in each group (such as banner advertising, email, or RSS feeds)

• The particular role you have as a web data analyst and the aspect of the business you're responsible for (such as marketing, merchandising, site operations, or loyalty programs)

For example, as a marketing manager for a commercial web site, you may care about the visitors who are acquired via pay-per-click advertising. As a product or merchandise manager for the same web site, someone else may care about the smaller slice of visitors who clicked on the pay-per-click advertisement for a specific paid keyword, and performed a local search onthe web site for related merchandise, but left the site without making a purchase. Your customer service manager may care about the segment of customers who searched the self-help content but finished their visit on the "contact us" page, apparently not finding what they were looking for.

3.13.2. General Requirements for Segmentation

Visitor segmentation is entirely driven by the abilities of your web measurement application. Put another way, if your particular solution doesn't support visitor segmentation, you can either get a new solution or not segment your visitors. Here are some general requirements that your measurement application needs in order to support to segment visitors:

• The ability to define a segment based on any applicable filtering criteria, such as pages or query strings viewed during visits, or the duration of visits

• The ability to customize any web measurement report by restricting it to a specific visitor segment or segments.

• The availability of detailed, historical web traffic data records that allow you to query historical data by slicing it into newly defined segments.

The last item is often considered a "nice to have" requirement, as many web measurement solutions provide only "move forward" segmentationthe ability to track segments from the time they're established, but not prior to that dateas opposed to ad hoc segmentation from any existing data. Ad hoc segmentation because it's very difficult to know in advance what you'll want to know later on. As usual, if you have any questions about your vendor's ability to segment your visitors in meaningful ways, the best advice is to pick up the phone and give them a call.

3.13.3. Defining Good Visitor Segments

The following are just a few basic examples of typical segments with hints on how you can define each segment based on the data available to you about your visitors.

New versus returning visitors

Perhaps the most basic, but most valuable, visitor segment, you should definitely create a segmentation report for new versus returning visitors. By taking a closer look at the differences between which pages each type of visitor is looking at, you can hopefully learn how to convert more "new" visitors into "returning" visitors.

Conversion success

Maybe the most frequent type of segmentation applied by web analysts is to distinguish between visitors who complete a critical action and those who do not. Depending on the mission of your web site, that action may be completing a registration form, making a purchase, or finding a support document without dialing your call center. Here you would define the segment as the slice of visitors who have completed the success action, usually measured as a view of a specific page during their visit (for example, a thank you page).

Visitor acquisition source

To segment by visitor acquisition source, you would define segments by creating unique landing pages [Hack #46] for each of your marketing campaigns. Any visitor who starts her visit on one of these pages is assumed to have come from the related marketing campaign and should thus be assigned to the appropriate segment.

Purpose of visit

Without interviewing a visitor, it is not possible to know for sure what the purpose of his visit is. However, you can attempt to infer his purpose from the type of pages that the visitor is viewing or the order in which he views them. For example, you can define the segment of prospective customers as those visitors who view pages related to your offering. Similarly, you can define self-help visitors as those who spend time on your customer service section.

Product interest or purchase

A merchandise manager may wish to distinguish visitors by product interest in order to better understand how visitors research her line of products. This requires defining segments based on the products or product categories viewed or purchased during a visit. Make sure to differentiate "buyers" from "tire kickers" in this type of segmentation so that you have data to help identify why the tire kickers convert.

Value of the visitor

You probably want to focus some of your analysis on high-value customers to find out how they find your web site and navigate it. While the specific definition of "high value" differs greatly from site to site, in general:

• As a retailer, you may care about customers whose order value exceeds a certain amount. The order value is typically captured from a URL parameter or tag that you set aside on your order confirmation page.

• As a content web site owner, you may care about customers with more than five visits per week. You can track the number of repeat visits per visitor if you are using cookies or authenticated user-names to identify repeat visitors.

By segmenting high-value visitors, you will be able to mine their habits in an effort to create more high-value visitors. Look for clues in their referring sources (for example, do they come from a special set of sites?), their product interests (for example, do they browse and buy a certain set of products?), and their recency and frequency of visit (for example, do they visit more frequently than lower value customers?).

3.13.4. Tying It All Together

At the end of the day, visitor segments help you better understand your visitors as distinct groups. By culling customer support visitors out, you'll be able to generate more accurate buyer conversion rates. By removing non-customers from your support segment, you'll be able to better understand the challenges facing your paying customers. By segmenting visitors from a particularly expensive referring source, you'll be able to accurately determine the return for that investment.

While not easy, and often not inexpensive (several vendors charge extra for ad hoc visitor segmentation), visitor segmentation is an important component in your advanced web measurement toolset to help you better understand your visitors.

Akin Arikan and Eric T. Peterson