Oct 27 2008
Advanced Segmentation for Free
Last week Google Analytics released some fantastic new features. You can read all about them on Occam’s Razor. There is one specific feature that I think will (or should) have a huge impact on higher education websites.
What new feature am I talking about? Advanced Segmentation! As website owners should know, segmentation of your website statistics is key. Now Google Analytics will allow you to do some advanced segmentation out of the box.
- Split out your new users vs. your returning users and compare behaviors.
- Split out your branded keyword referrals vs. your non-branded keyword referrals and compare behaviors.
… and so on …
What does this mean for other web analytics vendors? In my opinion, a lot. Although most higher education sites use Google Analytics, there are some that use other vendors. It’s still unbelievable to me that those vendors (most of them) don’t offer advanced segmentation out-of-the-box.
Not all our visitors are the same. Segmentation helps us track behavior by those differences. With the limited budgets of higher education websites, having to buy an add-on simply to handle segmentation is ridiculous.
I hope this new feature in Google Analytcis will push other vendors to do the same.
