Google Analytics recently added a slew of enterprise-features to its service, and it's never too soon to begin taking advantage of them. But we understand if you're having trouble getting motivated on your own.
To help, we asked Google Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik for some guidance. He said he's most excited about "advanced segmentation," and offered tips for how to use the feature to gain important insight on your e-commerce site whether you use Google's service or a similar analytics program.
First, Kaushik explains what advanced segmentation is and why it's so important. "When people look at their data, it is all aggregated, and when you look at it that way it's hard to see what's important for your particular business," he said. "Even if two people sound like they have a similar business, say they sell t-shirts, each business executes a very different strategy to be successful. They have different priorities, which means what works for one business in terms of data and reports could be completely irrelevant and useless for the other."
For instance, one t-shirt seller could be trying to generate overseas sales while another may be trying to optimize paid search campaigns. "This is where segmentation comes in. You have the ability to go in and customize the view of data to look at," said Kaushik. "It reduces the time it takes to get useful information from hours to minutes. You just need to ask what's most important to look at, and in seconds you can create the segment of data you need and just evaluate that."
Because advanced segmentation lets you view what you deem to be most important to evaluate, you can use it to assess all the traffic coming from an e-mail campaign offering $3 off a t-shirt, or if you want to see any customers who came from China or everyone who came under the paid keywords "t-shirt and Christmas."
Kaushik said that Google Analytics always had segmentation capability, but it was super difficult to use, and is proud to point out that his seven-year-old daughter Damini created two segments in 10 minutes. So with that for inspiration, here's how to get started.
Click on the Advanced Segmentation (beta) link in Google Analytics. You 'll see a list of default segments. You can use what applies to you from the list, or pick one and, copy it and then customize it. For instance, select "new visitors," copy it and then have it identify visitors from a specific country. You will see customer and campaign attributes as well as metrics on the left to create custom segments of your own.
"Here is one thing any e-commerce merchant could do," said Kaushik. "If you are dropping an e-mail campaign, and have four ideas of campaigns to run and a list of 10,000, you generally would choose a couple ideas and e-mail them to everyone. Instead, what you can do as super smart segmentation person, is take your four ideas, and send out four different offers four sets of 500 people, for a total of 2,000.
"Wait 10 hours, or six hours, or even a day, then go into Analytics and create a custom report. Apply the segment of e-mail offers you just sent out, and you're looking at data in real time as it comes in and seeing which ones got the best response. Now you have the information about which idea worked best. Now you use that to mail the other 8,000. And you've just improved your conversions compared to sending out four campaigns to all 10,000. This is something you can figure out in a day."
Here are some other strategies for Advanced Segmentation from Kaushik.
1: Segment Out Brand Search Keywords
Because most SEM/SEO efforts focus on brand terms, Kaushik advises beginning by segmenting these out to "get a reality check on how big that segment is, and how important it is and is it worthy of our obsession."
In the search box on top of Dimensions type in Key, and Analytics will find the relevant options for you. Drag the Keywords box to the Dimension and Metric box. When you start typing a keyword in the Value box, in our example we're using "Avinash," the program will offer suggestions, you click on the one you want.
"One sweet feature that differentiates segment creation in Google Analytics from that of other vendors is the ability to do real time QA (quality control) and test the segment you have created," said Kaushik. Next, click on Test Segment, and GA will run a life query for the time period chosen and bring the actual data for the segment. In this case, of the 44,528 visits, he got 576 visits from his brand names. This is low, but Kaushik warns it is because he chose "matches exactly" in conditions.
"So the segment I have created is how many Visits from people typing in the exact term 'avinash,' what I wanted was Visits generated by every variation of 'avinash,' including avinash kaushik. avinash blog. analytics blog avinash. amazing avinash awesome author. Ok that last one's made up."
You can now apply this segment to pretty much every single report that you have in Analytics. After changing "matches exactly" to "contains," the segment is created.
"For example, you could go in and see what content (pages) do people who come on Brand Keywords consume. What products do they buy? If I were GM then which product brochures do they download? On a tech support site, did they find the right tech support answer? For a social networking site, do people under brand terms show a higher Visitor Loyalty or lower? And on and on," said Kaushik.
(Please Continue to Page 2 for More Strategies on Advanced Segmentation) 
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
