Segmentation and personas are areas of interest to traditional marketing departments. But now with web analytics, consumer segments can be set up and analysed real time and/or historically with many of the standard web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture’s Site Catalyst or Discover, Clicktracks or Webtrends.
If you look at the average conversion rate for your whole website, on it’s own although useful, would considerably more insightful if you could filter the effectiveness of different segments / people / campaigns - see the conversion rate of .
What do I mean by a consumer segment?
It could be PPC (pay per click) campaign traffic, or seo traffic, or email campaign traffic. Or a segment where people clicked on a banner or landing page on the website.
You can then easily compare the average conversion rates of these different segments and also bear in mind actual amount of traffic from each segment. For example, email campaigns might have a conversion rate of 4.2% compared to PPC traffic with a 2.6% but there might be significantly more PPC traffic than email traffic in which case, better to spend one’s time and efforts optimising PPC than email campaigns.
I’ll post some more on segmentation later this week. Thanks so much for reading!
April 9 2008
Hi Marianina,
I think you make a very good point about the importance of segmentation. I like to carry that analysis even further, and measure what the expected return is per segment. If I get a 4.2% conversion rate from email and 2.6% from ppc, the question of the average spend from an email customer versus a ppc customer also factors in to the calculations (assuming revenue is your objective).
So many ways to slice and dice…the other big question, of course is identifying how to break down the segments. Demographically, by channel or what have you.
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