Blog Traffic Analysis

With the introduction of Advanced Segments in Google Analytics, bloggers can now fine-tune the data mining filters to churn out the exact information they want. Combined with the power of Custom Reporting, it delivers the required information with ease. Let's see how to unleash the power of this beast to take out the relevant information that matters.

Segment and Conquer

To further refine the search, we must set 'Condition' as 'Matches Exactly' while giving the 'Value' as 'google'.

Now the last condition was to get information about those visitors who are highly engaged during their visit. How do we quantify this condition? Well, it depends on how much activity you consider as engaging. I personally consider page views of 3 and more in a session as highly engaged visit. To retrieve this information, I must set the dimension 'Page Depth' with 'Condition' as 'Grater than or equal to' and of course 'Value' field set as '3'. To get the required information, all these 3 conditions must be met simultaneously, therefore I have used the 'AND' clause while joining these 3 conditions.

Advanced Segments feature was enabled in my Analytics account about 24 hours back, and since then I am glued to it, experimenting and defining countless number of segments giving me extremely important information which was beyond my imagination prior to introduction of this new feature. The sheer power of this new feature can be imagined as Analytics giving you the ability to find a pin in a haystack, and that too, instantly. Let's create some segments and get a taste of it.

Note: For testing purposes I have randomly taken data of 3 successive days

Highly engaged visitors of US coming from Google SE

In first example, I want to know the number of visitors from United States coming via Google services (search engine or referral link via any of the Google services) and have visited at least 3 or more pages in a single visit. So our equation becomes:

Result ~ Visitors (US) "AND" Via Google "AND" Page Depth >= 3

To get this information you can create a new segment as shown below in the picture. It's a simple drag and drop methodology with selecting values from drop down lists. I have chosen 'Country/Territory' as 'United States'. The next condition is visits via Google. To retrieve those visits I have taken dimension 'Traffic Sources' as 'Source' with value 'google'. Notice the 'Condition' value 'Contains'. This ensures that the referring URL must contain the string google at any place.


And here is the result. Out of total 3,307 visits:

1. 1,680 visits from United States
2. 761 visits from referral URL's containing 'google' string
3. 394 visits with page views >= 3
4. 41 visits, which fulfill all the above conditions collectively <- Result

Where To Go From Here?

Do I need to say anything more?

With these 2 examples, you've got a glimpse of this new feature in Google Analytics. This is just a tip of the iceberg. You can also filter out the data on the basis of specific time (hours in a day), landing pages, exit pages. For example, you can create a segment that shows you the number of visitors coming from US between 3:00 PM to 8:00 PM on a specific post and spending at least 3 minutes on it, and then viewing at least 3 pages, and then clicking an Adsense ad with slot ID xxxxx, and then exiting via so and so post, and then.....