Nedstat released its new upgrade to Sitestat, a segmentation tool, three weeks ago now. It provides the ability to filter any of the standard and custom Sitestat reports using any of large range of variables, either individually or in detailed combinations. However the big question is how to go about integrating this new tool in your web data analysis. Top analysts have probably already found a million and one uses, for most people though I would recommend starting with small steps and extending this over time.

Save some basic segments

When I first started playing with Segmentation, there were some basic filters that I wanted to try out. These are filters that I can imagine everyone, regardless of the type of website, will want to apply to many of the reports they look at, both in their regular and ad-hoc reporting. While it only takes a few seconds to set up each of these filters, setting them up once and saving them means they are very easy to use in the future. They can then be applied to the whole report or an individual report item.

The key filters that I would recommend setting up as pre-saved segments are:

• Each of your traffic sources – direct entry, organic search, external referrers, paid search, online display, email, affiliates (note that different traffic sources will require you to use alternative filters options in order to be set up)
• Type of visitor – either new or returning
• Location of visitor – keeping this simple, just UK and non UK.
• Level of visitor usage of the website – this could relate to the number of visits per visitor or the number of pages viewed. It should be set up for light and heavy users and will require you to define these levels.
• Visitors who bounce – possibly the light users above, this should be users who only viewed one page. Although a better option might be to also combine with the filters for new to the website and/or only made one visit.

Remember that Sitestat segmentation is based on visitors and therefore some of these segments will only be indicative rather than absolute. For example, the segment for paid search will include all visits and pages viewed for these visitors during the defined time period, not just data for visits from paid search.

Comparing website performance for different segments

The first way I started using segmentation was to look at a single report item across the whole website and then for various filter options. A great example of this would be to look at the browse to buy rate for alternative traffic sources in order to understand the effectiveness of your online marketing spend. Other report items that I would find it very interesting to compare across different traffic sources include the frequency table reports (visits per visitor, page views or duration per visit) or navigation reports (funnels and click path explorer).

Create a report containing the single report item but do not create any segmentation filter to be applied to the report. Copy the report item multiple times, once for each segment that you wish to look at – this would mean pressing the copy button five times if you want to compare direct entry, external referrers, natural search, paid search and display advertising. Then by editing each of the copied report items, apply a different segment to each one.

This report now displays a single metric that can be compared across multiple segments and indexed against the performance of the website as a whole. For ease of reading, it can be transferred across to excel. I can imagine managers would appreciate a simple excel table that contains the performance of the predefined website KPIs for the previous month indexed across traffic sources.

Successful Visitors

A blog post that is currently only half written in my head will deal with the concept of successful visitors. It will deal with the idea that what we should be trending and reporting on is only successful visitors/visits instead of all visitors/visits as most people would do currently. This would eliminate visits where the visitor simply bounces and ideally all visits where the visitors was actually not really interested in your website. There should then be a clear correlation between the number of successful visitors in a week and the success of the website during that week as defined by conversions or revenue.

But that is all for a future post.

In the meantime, just putting it simply, it could be worthwhile creating a couple of more complex segments that approximate a successful visitor for your website. This could be a visitor who (for example) visited at least 3 times, viewed at least 6 pages during a visit, viewed the ‘contact us’ page and/or downloaded a PDF. This segment should be refined over time but it would be interesting to look at the percentage of website visitors who are acting like you would like them to. More on this in the future.

Save both the report and the segment

Something which tripped me up a couple of times at first is that the segment that you have applied to a report needs to be saved separately to the report in order for it to be applied to the report the next time it is opened. Also, if you are saving in the report in the shared folder (e.g. so that it can be shared with a colleague), the segment must also be saved in the shared folder for segments. Given this, if you do set up a set of standard segments as I recommend above, this should be done in the shared folder.

Using the AND/OR options in segmentation

The default option within segmentation when using multiple filters within a segment is AND. This means that all conditions must be met in order for the data for that visitor to be included in the report. In order to switch this to OR, the desired filter should be dragged within the boundary of the other filter. Try playing around and you should get the hang of this pretty quickly. However it gets a little more difficult when setting up complicated segments.

For example, a segment that looks like (a OR b) AND c AND (d OR e) is quite straight forward to set up. But a segment that is (a AND b) OR c OR (d AND e) cannot be done within the one operation. The workaround for this is to first create and save two segments, one for a AND b and the other for d AND e. A new segment can then be set up that is ‘segment 1′ OR c OR ‘segment 2′ using the filter option for include segment.

Using the any/all/first/last options in segmentation

This option is relevant for the many filters that relate to visit level. Examples include the different traffic sources, made a purchase, viewed a certain page, etc. These are all options which a visitor could do in one visit to the website but not in another. You have the option of choosing whether visitors need to meet this criteria during any visit to the website during the selected time period, during every visit or during a specific visit. The default is any visit but the option you select really depends on the business question that you are trying to answer through creating this segment.

The first and last visit options could be very relevant for attributing revenue or conversions to alternative marketing campaigns. The all visits option can be useful in viewing data only for visitors that always perform certain actions. But I imagine that most of the time you will simply leave this as any visit.

Note again that this criteria is used for selecting the visitors whose data will be included in the report. Once the visitor is selected, all of their data will be included regardless of whether any or all is used.

The logic for this may seem fairly straight forward at first. However once more than one filter has been included, it can get a little tricky. It increases in difficulty with multiple filters, combining AND and ORs, combining any visit and all visits and also through using the DID NOT option. If a detailed segment will help in answering a business question, then do go ahead and create it. I just recommend being careful, possibly reading the segment out aloud as a sense check, in order to avoid misinterpreting the data that you have produced.

So you have a new free tool, it is going to be incredibly useful in understanding and improving the performance of your website and your online marketing, now how do you use it?

Creating Segments

First of all, create a new report in Sitestat, you can use any report items that you want. At the top of the screen, you should see a new line with the term ‘All Visitors’ and an arrow on the right. Clicking on the arrow opens up the Segmentation area of Sitestat.

On the left are all of the filter menu options. There are a multitude of filter here, selecting one is a simple matter of clicking and dragging across to the main area. In the same way as in Sitestat, anything that is in blue is clickable, meaning the range of filter options is actually well over 100. Once a filter has been selected, to apply to the report, just hit the ‘Update Report’ link at the bottom of the Segmentation area.

Two or more filters can be combined using AND and OR boolean logic in order to create quite specific segments. Note as well that the yellow bar next to a filter that has been selected represents the proportion of visitors that meet the specified criteria, a quick way of understanding if your filter is for many or few visitors.

It is all about User Behaviour

A key point to note though is that Segmentation is always based on visitors. This needs to be kept in mind when looking at any data, it is for all visitors who meet the criteria set within the segmentation filter. The data shown is for all measurements and across all visits within the specified time period for these visitors, not just the visits or measurements that meet the specified criteria.

This point means that you may feel somewhat constrained in using segmentation in that it does not mean you can use all Sitestat reports for just one section of your website or for just one traffic source. Instead, Segmentation is at it’s best in giving insights into user behaviour. But for whatever you are looking at, it does give indicative numbers, it does allow you to trend performance and it will give valuable insights that will enable you to make sound business decisions.

Useful Segments

The key segments that I initially anticipate using are for new and returning users, for different traffic sources and ideally, for successful visitors. The different traffic sources (direct entry, external referrers, natural search and alternative online marketing sources) will be incredibly useful segments for understanding the behaviour of visitors from each source and understanding how valuable each source is to your website. This can guide in future budgeting decisions.

However, defining a segment for successful visitors could be the most powerful use of Segmentation. This definition of sucess might include the filter options for making a purchase, spending at least a certain amount of time on the site, visiting a certain area of the website, etc. But once you have this definition, it can be used to understand the impact of product features in driving success, understand the relative contribution of those traffic sources, etc. You can move beyond a focus on the quantity of traffic to focusing on the quality of traffic.

Final Points

Again, just remember that for these segments, you are looking at all measurements from all visits by these visitors, not just the visits which contributed to the success or which were from that particular traffic source.

A couple of last points to note are that a segments can be applied to the whole report or to just individual report items (by editing the report item and using the Override tab) and that all segments can be saved and applied to any other reports.

I expect to write a couple more posts on using this new tool. If anyone wants to ask any questions regarding the best way to use it, feel free and I will try to answer in my next post.

In my role as a consultant with Nedstat, I use Sitestat every day. I use it to look at data from a range of industries and to answer all sorts of queries. What I intend to start doing is writing posts on how to better use Sitestat, which reports to use to answer different queries and how to use some of the less common but very useful reports.

These posts will not include the basic information on how to create new reports or open reports in Sitestat, Nedstat offers academies where that is all covered. This should be a reference guide and some useful tips for people who know how to use Sitestat already but want to take it a step further. Hopefully this information may also be helpful for users of other web analytics packages, I assume they offer similar reports.

And just a reminder that this is not an official Nedstat blog so please don’t hold the company responsible for anything I may say.