Underused Google Analytics Features - Part Two

31.07.2009 Posted in Analytics

Back in part one of this series I discussed the User Defined Variable and its usefulness to helping segment visitors. Now I’m going to talk about another good segment: “Visit Includes xxx” There are going to be several key pages on your site. Pages that help define a visitor who has interacted in a useful way and one who hasn’t. Here is a quick and easy way to view and compare between these two groups.

Let’s say you want to look at users who add an item to the cart. Ignoring for now people who buy (who you would expect to always fall into this category), people who add an item to your cart have clearly found something they like about your site/products more than people who don’t. It could be the price you are offering, it could be how easy it was to find the product, it could simply be that they could find the “add to cart” button but people in a different browser couldn’t.

You’d want to know about these things, right?

Well here’s how

Create a new advanced segment

Use “Page” from the content section and choose your add-to-cart page. Name and test the segment to be sure it isn’t horrifically incorrect, then apply it to your report.

Similarly, you can create another advanced segment where the page is set to “does not contain” the cart page. That will choose all visits where users did not add an item to the cart.

Compare statistics

Above are two of the main referrers for a site. The highlighted column is the visit numbers. As you can see, visitors from the second referrer were more than twice as likely to add an item to the cart. This is useful information, and your marketing teams will definitely want to know this before they go into negotiations with these referrers.

In the next article: Event Tracking and applying this kind of segmentation if your add-to-cart button doesn’t actually send somebody to a cart page. View here.