In many of the strategies SEO What we can carry out is essential to measure web analytics to evaluate what is happening and what measures we must apply to improve our strategy. At this point, it is very important to know how to segment web traffic and knowing Google Analytics Segments can give a great boost in decision making.
what are segments SEO?
The segments in SEO are groupings of content and web traffic with the aim of evaluating the performance of a part of our website. Segment our traffic and cross this information together with the goal conversion can make a difference in the way you interpret web traffic information.
An example could be evaluating the traffic of our store. If all the urls in our store area contain “/product/” we can create a segment to analyze the traffic only from those urls. Sometimes not all the urls that we want to analyze follow the same pattern. In this case we will have to use regular expressions to create our segment.
Importance of segmentation in SEO
Sometimes, we work with websites that have different areas and strategies and we are interested in differentiating what performance each of them is giving.
If we have a website with an ecommerce and a blog but we do not know the conversion that each area reports to us, we will have to segment by zones to try to analyze. For example, out of a total of 20.000 visits per month we want to know where users move and where they come from. In this case we can first segment by type of organic traffic and secondly we must create a segment by url to see how many of those users from organic traffic end up, for example, in the store (url /products/).
In this way we can know which parts of the web need improvements and it gives us an idea of what kind of strategy SEO we must carry out.
If we do not apply segmentation we would be studying the web as a whole and it would be impossible for us to know the evolution of certain areas of the web. In the previous example, the purpose is to know how the evolution of web traffic within the products has been.
Segment Types SEO
In short, we can use the following types of segmentation
- By type of urls
- By traffic sources
- by strategy
Segments by type of urls
As in the previous example, we can group all the urls of our website following a pattern so that we can study the user behavior within that group of urls.
Segments by traffic source
If we have carried out advertising campaigns in the media, in Google Ads or other traffic sources, it is convenient to differentiate them from the rest of the URLs to study their impact, for example, how many users from an advertisement in a newspaper have made a conversion on the web. In this case, we would segment by source or medium.
Segments by strategy
In this case, it is convenient to group areas of the web according to your intention. We can only analyze the traffic of the home page, of the product categories, by urls with a certain nomenclature... A good example of this is filtering the traffic by language. In the event of having a website with a structure of languages by subfolders, we can segment the traffic by urls type /en/, /it/ etc. In this way we can see the total traffic in each language and evaluate it to make certain decisions.
Types of segments Google Analytics
By default Google Analytics offers us a series of predefined segments but we can create custom segments.
Some of them are:
- payment traffic
- tablet traffic
- direct traffic
- organic traffic
- ...
You can select within the list to see the rest.
How to create segments in Google Analytics?
How you create segments in Google Analytics will depend on the type of segment. When we have urls with a differentiated pattern, it is relatively easy to create a custom segment. Following the previous example, if we want to measure the traffic within the store area, we will use the URLs that refer to the areas of the store website, such as product, product category... as we see in the image below.
We select add segment / create segment / conditions. In event actions we select “page” or “landing page”/ in the next field “begins with” and finally we introduce the url fragment by which we identify the content group: “/shop/”, “/products/” etc…
In this way, when we want to measure, for example, the acquisition of users, the bounce rate... we will select the strategic segment that we are interested in analyzing.
How to see the segments in Google Analytics?
Once we are clear about what we want to analyze and what segments we need, simply select the segment and set a time period. In this case, it is important to make the comparison with another period of time, with the previous month, the same month but from the previous year or any period of time that interests us.
