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 SegmentsNo 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 segmentationThat said, keep the following in mind as you brainstorm possible segments:
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 SegmentationVisitor 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 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 SegmentsThe 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.
3.13.4. Tying It All TogetherAt 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 |