5. Setting Advanced Segments Sign in to your Analytics account Go to upper right of dashboard Click All Visits button ClickCreate a new advanced segment
First I’ll go over how to set advanced segments to see just your PPC data in analytics. Then I’ll go into the different ways that you can focus on your AdWords conversions.
You can use advanced segments to see the behaviors of the visitors to your site. For example, use advanced segments to separate your audience by members and non-members.
An advanced segment lets you focus on one area of visitor type, behaviors, and in this example, the traffic source. The image on the right is the Analytics dashboard for my paid search traffic. I have selected to view my paid search segment against all visits. The paid search is shown in orange. I can see that paid search brought 286 of the 488 total visits to the site, which represents 582 of the 1,087 pageviews.
So first, I’ll tell you how to set advanced segments. After you’ve signed in to your analytics account, Go to the upper right of your dashboard, and next to advanced segments, click the all visits button. On the left part of this screen, click on the blue “create a new advanced segment”.
This is what your screen will look like after you click the “all visits” button. Note that I’m illustrating how to set advanced segments for ppc, which is just an example. You can also check the paid search traffic box to see all of your paid search efforts at once. So, to create a new advanced segment, click “create a new advanced segement”
Once you’re in the creating advanced segments tool, Under the green Dimensions tab, click the drop down for Traffic Sources. Find “medium” and click and drag the green box to the first box on the right, which looks like this: [NEXT SLIDE].
the green “medium” in the first top box. In the “value” drop down, select CPC.
At the bottom of the page, you can Name your segment. Here I named it PPC. Now click “create segment.” You’re now ready to apply your advanced segments to your analytics reports.
I now have the PPC segment applied to my reports. This view is the Visitors overview. From here I can see the browser, connection speed, language, and other factors of my PPC visitors.
And now I’ll tell you how to focus on finding your AdWords conversions by time of day, day of the week, and month of the year
So why use an AdWords segment? AdWords gives you many tools with which to monitor and optimize your ads’ performance. There’s ad scheduling, demographic targeting, and managed placements, just to name a few. Setting an advanced segment will help you monitor your adwords advertising efforts more closely.
There are a few ways to find AdWords traffic. The first is in AdWords under the Dimensions tabThe other ways are in Analytics either as an advanced segment or in the Day Parts report
As I discussed earlier, another way to focus on a particular traffic source is by setting up advanced segments. To set an advanced segment for AdWords, set the source to Google and medium to CPC. Advanced segments are useful to help you look at the site usage of Adwords visitors.
With advanced segments in place, you can find your AdWords performance by time, day, week, and month. First, on the right side of your screen, go to Visits and select visitors. This allows you to see traffic by time.
Next, set your graph view. The first box is the time of day, followed by day, week, and month. Note that I added the graph labels fo
As an example, this is what the time of day graph looks like. Notice that is titled “visits for all visitors”. But since we just set the advanced segment for AdWords cpc, this is the just the Adwords traffic.
This is the dropdown view of the different segments under the dimensions tab. You can also see demographic information, placements, search terms, and conversions.
Another way to find visits by time of day is with the Day Parts report in Analytics. This is only available if you have destination auto-tagging turned on and your AdWords account is linked to analytics. Under traffic sources, select AdWords. From there, select the Day Parts report.
You can view the graph by hour of day or day of the week. This is helpful when analyzing trends, and deciding how to allocate your advertising dollars.
To recap, I’ve discussed how to set advanced segments to learn more about your visitors’ behavior and the outcomes of your online advertising efforts. I focused on segmenting AdWords traffic because AdWords offers many tools to help you monitor and optimize your ad campaigns. With an Adwords advanced segment, you can find out how your ads are performing by times of day, month, and year to help you use your advertising dollars more effectively. In the near future, we’ll have a blog post about how to use advanced segments to increase your advertising ROI. But for now, I hope you learned a little more about Analytics and AdWords.
If you have any questions, we are Adam howitt consulting, inc, and you can email Adam at adam@adamhowitt.com or give us a call. We’re also on twitter at @adamhowitt.