How to Use Advanced Segments and Custom Reports in Google Analytics [Video]

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Google Analytics offers two tools that are like peanut butter and chocolate. They're good by themselves, but they're great together.

This video demonstration shows you how you can "slice up" your visitors to understand their buying habits based on two predictive metrics: average time on site, and average pages per visit. These metrics are used to define the engagement of a visitor. Our goal is to understand the personalities of visitors with different behaviors, and explore their unique buying habits.

Ultimately, we will use four advanced segments and a custom report to accomplish our goal.

We start off by defining four basic visitor personalities: Bouncy Bob, Lost Lucy, Methodical Mary, and One-Hit Juan. They represent four styles of engagement.

Bouncy Bob will spend below average time on the site and will visit few pages during his visit.

Like Bob, Lost Lucy will spend little time on the site, but will hit a number of pages higher than the site's page-per-visit average. It's like she is lost.

One-hit Juan spends a great deal of time on the site, but visits few pages. He lingers on some content before moving on.

Finally, Methodical Mary spends a great deal of time and visits many pages. This is typically considered a sign of high engagement.

Which of the visitors turn out to be buyers? We created the segments in Google Analytics and built a custom report to find out.

One thing that is very clear from this analysis is that our customers need to spend a great deal of time on the site before they purchase. Furthermore, we see the importance of getting visitors back to the site, as return visitors of all personality types convert at significantly higher levels.