Following Unique Visitor Groups

So now that we’ve recognized the different user populations, we need to start following their unique traffic patterns. To do that we will use two tool: Custom Reports and Visitor Segmentation

Custom Reports

Since we already identified the key metrics for each visitor, we can make a custom report that will quickly give us the useful information in one form.

So we enter Google Analytics and select Custom Reporting

And we create a new report:

We’ll make a report for our local visitors, so we’ll drag and drop the following metrics: Entrances, Time on Page, Average Time on Page, Page Views

For the dimensions we’ll begin with City then we can ‘drill down’ further. This is where the power lies. We can look at people from Madison, WI (my town) and then click on that metric to see what the Landing Pages appear to be. This will only give us the top pages for people from Madison excluding users we don’t want. We can then drill down further to Exit Pages so for each Madison visitor, we can see the landing page and for each landing page we can see where the leave from (presumably because they found what they wanted or they were frustrated).

I’ll save this report as Local Searches and then when I run it and drill down two levels, I can see that the top landing page for users from Madison is the homepage (no surprise) and from that landing page I can see the top exit pages. Now I can begin to dig into what users are or are not finding.

Visitor Segmentation

We can generate a similar report using our key metrics for visitors. However, a more efficient way is to create a new visitor segmentation.

We’ll begin by selecting Advanced Segmentation

We’ll make a new segment and we’ll select City as the metric. This is a little loose and dirty and can be further enhanced with regular expressions or combination of metrics. However, we just want a quick division between those individuals that are local and those that are not.

After selecting City from Visitors we will segment out all visitors that are not from Madison. We’ll call this segment Not-UW (after University of Wisconsin).

After saving, it takes us back to our Advanced Segmentation window. Now if we click on our new segment we have full access to all reports that only involve individuals from outside of Madison.

And here they are. If we want to toggle back and forth we can select different segments from the Advanced Segments drop down at the top of the report.

In addition, we can have information from both segments (or many other default segments) combined into the same report .

When we apply, this will give us the report with different groups appearing in different colors:

Now that are different user groups are isolated, we can really begin to dig deep into what each user base wants and needs.