Breaking down your data for insights

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Hey! In this video we’re going to take a look at a web analytics technique called “segmentation.”

Segmentation helps you break down and understand the data you get from web analytics in smaller chunks to help you get more insights and improve your website’s performance.
Let’s go back to the guesthouse example, where one of your goals is to get people to book a room at the guesthouse.

If you use your web analytics tool and look at your high level data, you might learn that only 3% of all your website visitors are indeed signing up.

To understand this a little better, you can use segmentation to break down all those visitors by different groupings. First, let’s break it down by geographic segments, starting with country. As it turns out, when we look at our visitors by where they live, there are some big differences in whether or not they book a room, and that makes sense.

People in the UK, for example, represent a big percentage of our visitors, and they’re converting at 6%, which is twice the average rate! When we look at visitors from the US, though, we see a fair bit of traffic, but a really low conversion rate of 1%. Immediately, you’ve got a good idea: adding a bit of content tailored to American visitors could help you get more bookings. For example, adding some information about the best ways to get to the guesthouse after landing at Heathrow would help.

Let’s dive deeper. We’ll break down the UK segment even further into specific cities.

Here, we can see that London and Leeds stand out as more likely to make a reservation. Perhaps running some local advertising campaigns in those cities could help you get more bookings.

So what’s the big deal with segmentation? Well, as you’re starting to see, segmentation gives you some insights you can action.

Fun, right? Let’s back up and segment by something different. How about the ways people are getting to our website.

This can help us answer questions like: “Are people who come from social media more likely to book a room?”

When you break down your visitors by where they came from, you can see the differences between your organic search traffic, paid search traffic, social media traffic, and more.

And this can help you decide where you want to invest your time and resources as you build up your digital marketing campaigns across lots of different channels.

Let’s do one more. This time, we’ll chop up our visitors by the kind of device they’re using, and we’ll be able to see any differences between things like desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Here we get more valuable information. People on computers and tablets are booking to the tune of 4%. But people on smartphones almost never make a reservation.

To improve things, you could work on making your website more mobile-friendly or see if there are issues with how your online booking process is working on smartphones that you can fix.

And that might help increase the number of bookings that you’re getting - another impactful insight!

So that’s segmentation. Of course, you can slice and dice by just about anything that piques your curiosity, but the general idea is this: break things down into smaller groups and find insights that can help you figure out how to improve.

So dive in, start segmenting, and see what kinds of answers you can find!