- [Instructor] Segmentation is the first step
in True Analysis and we have tons and tons of ways
to segment users in Google Analytics.
We'll look at each of these in detail
throughout this course,
but for now, I'd like to touch on the types of segments
we're going to be looking at,
give you a little bit of a preview,
and the key idea here is that we're gonna stop looking
at all of our visitors as one big homogenous entity,
and instead we're gonna dive in and compare them
and group them so we can better understand them,
and that we're better poised to take action
and optimize our site and our business.
One of the most common differentiators that comes to mind
when we think of the different groups
of visitors to our site
is where they're from geographically.
There are plenty of ways for us to break down
how different users from different parts of the world
interact with our site.
Google Analytics allows you view audience data as a whole
at the worldview as we see here,
or we can drill down into each country,
we can go into each region or state,
and go down as far as into city itself.
Traffic channels are another critically important segment
that splits users up by channel in which they came.
Now, how many conversions came from organic search?
How did it compare to traffic that came from social media?
We'll also wanna segment out our visitors
who do certain things on our site.
The traffic segment that completes a checkout
is certainly different from the traffic segment
who came in and immediately hit the back button,
and we'd like to know more about what made them
have such completely different reactions.
One of the ways we can segment is by intent,
and the keywords that users type into search engines
can give us an insight into that intent.
Granted, we can't get as much from the organic
or free searches we used to,
but we still have full access to search advertising
and the searches that occur at our own sites,
which may be just as interesting.
As we examine the events that led up
to your arrival on the site,
we can compare that to the landing page you hit
when you arrive on our site.
The combination of those two factors
can give us great insight into your motivations
and they can reveal clue about why the user's visit
might be very successful, or not,
and, thus, the ability to segment by landing page
can be pretty revealing.
Even with seemingly small things,
like the type of browser,
that can shed light on the visit itself.
After all, what do we know about a large percentage
of Safari users?
They're on Mac, right?
Now, Mac users are certainly a different segment.
Apple ran an entire ad campaign
focusing on just how different that segment is.
But even beyond the operating system,
we know that folks took the time
to install Firefox or Chrome,
were at least savvy enough to do so.
They also cared enough about their browsing experience
to take the time to customize it
versus just using the default that came with the computer.
And of course, Safari's not Safari
because Safari on a MacBook is very different
than Safari on an iPhone,
and both are important to analyze.
And beyond just this idea of mobile versus desktop,
we can get detailed reports that tell us things
like the connection speed, the screen resolution,
and other segmentation information
that's gonna help us design sites
that are optimal for our user base.
And if nothing else, we can simply split the site
into two groups,
those who reached our goals versus those who didn't.
Just as examining successes or failures
in any aspect of life is useful,
examining successful and unsuccessful visits to our site
can give us insight into how we can optimize and improve.
Now if you're split testing your ads,
and by the way, if you're not, you should be,
then we'll want to understand how the segments
that saw one ad performed better than another.
These are just a few of your segmentation
and sub-segmentation options.
The options are really nearly endless
and they're gonna depend greatly
on what analysis you're performing
and, most importantly, the questions you're trying
to answer.
Main point here is to start thinking in terms of,
how do I want to slice up this data?
What dimensions do I want to see
and how do I wanna segment those?
And will I want to segment again after that?
Google Analytics helps you answer this
with their pre-segmented reports that are laid out
in the major tabs that we're gonna see,
but you've also had the ability to create your own segments
to break up your data.
We're gonna go over this in just a bit.