Web analytics…segmenting for success!

I am currently working at a company that tends to handle large multi-brand accounts, and as such, they have found the need to create their own integrated “enterprise marketing management” tool to handle both “big picture” and brand-specific questions on the fly. That said, in working with this tool, the part I am most excited about is creating web analytics reports for marketers that will be backed by real-time segmentation data versus the simple aggregated figures present in various “free” analytics tools.

In a recent interview with Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics guru and the author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day (which is on my “to read list” btw), he refers back to one of his long-standing tenets of segmenting customers until you get something insightful that you can understand and act on! That said, according to Avinash, with so much analytics data, it is important to start by segmenting the key customer targets for your business.

Three segments Avinash recommends drilling down into to start are:

• The people who convert – understand how they got there & what is important to them once they arrive
• The areas where you spend money -find areas of both efficiency & improvement
• The primary purposes for visiting the site by task completion rate – for all the reasons people come to your site, which tasks are they unable to complete?

No matter what segments you start with, however, Avinash implies the goal to be actionable insight on “lots of different kinds of people from different sources with different intents consuming different content trying to solve different tasks.”

Obviously this key segment information can be worth its weight in gold, but what are some other benefits of raw segmentation data versus aggregated results? What segments do you feel warrant the most focus for your business?