Google Analytics: Cross Segment Performance
Been using Google Analytics for a little while now and like it. It’s free and gives me nice and easy reporting. The delay is a little annoying, but a couple hours is fine and it’s faster than I’d get with once a day log analysis. For the most part I look at super top level information - the dashboard and then referrer information and geographic information just for kicks.
Recently I started playing around with the “cross segment performance” which can give some pretty interesting results. You can get cross segment performance numbers by going to almost any more detailed report (for example “Referring Source” underneath “Visitor Segment Performance”) and clicking on the little red button with the double chevrons to the left of each line item. So, for example, if you go to the Referring Source report, you’ll see the top 10 sources sending traffic to your site. Click on the red button and then click on “cross segment performance” - this will result in a list of criteria you can get information from. If you click on content it will show you which pages on that referring site the traffic was coming from, which can be helpful in finding out who’s linking to what. Another interesting segment is the “Visitor Type” segment, which will segment whatever report you are looking at into new and returning visitors.
All in all, it’s a really easy way to pull a little bit more interesting information out of Google Analytics, because I know you’re running it. And if you aren’t, you might want to give it a try, it’s really easy to install and use.
