Last weekend Dave and Becky went to the Think Visibility conference in Leeds and came back all enthused about Google Analytics again, after they’d seen a presentation by Joanna Butler which was about Advanced segmentation in Analytics. This is something that I have previously used and I thought it would be worthwhile to give a few of my own tips on it.

The basic concept I am discussing is the use of advanced segmentation to categorise visitors according to how likely they are to buy from you: lead, prospect, suspect. To illustrate I will use the example of a website selling a DIY book.

So a lead is someone who is actively looking to buy what you are selling, in this case someone who finds your site with a search term containing the keywords “diy” and “book”.

A prospect is someone who needs what you are selling, but isn’t aware of your product, for example those searching for “diy” and “help” or “guide”. These people are looking for help, but may not have decided to buy a book yet, they are less likely to buy than a lead, but they are still probably interested.

A suspect is someone who might or might not be in your market, you could consider anyone coming to your site with the keywords “diy”, but not “help”, “guide” or “book”, as suspects – they may or may not be interested in what you have to offer.

Finally you have the rest, those search terms that just don’t give you the conversion rates you need. You know the ones, it’s completely unrelated and you wonder how the hell Google ended up displaying your site for that search term.

Anyways, have a look and play around, it’s a quick and easy way to categorize data for thousands of keywords into more manageable information, you just need to set up the advanced segmentation by keyword with the correct or’s and and’s.