LVMetrics.com?specialist consultants for Digital Analytics and Behavioral Segmen

Posted by tedmark on May 7th, 2013

 To better articulate the issues with using aggregate level web analytics, we can segment behavioral segmentation use cases based on patterns. Patterns are a great way of addressing problems as a group of common underlying issues to be addresses by typical Digital Analytics projects

As an example of pattern based Digital Analytics, consider visitor segments that involve looking at behavior across multiple visits or multiple pages within the same session. Suppose an online store selling Fashion Garments and accessories wants to better understand a certain section of its visitor base and devise effective outreach activities targeted at this segment. The objective is to increase brand awareness in this particular segment so the client wants to track and increase the traffic from this segment coming from non-brand search terms. Here is how the Marketing Team would like to intuitively define this ‘Hip Crowd’ segment- a) Visitors whose most recent visit was less than 5 days ago b) The average time between their visits is less than 4 days c) These visitors spend at least 80% of their time per visit browsing high end merchandise d) They maybe existing customers but they have not made a purchase in the past 3 months. As can be seen, building this segment requires remembering ‘state’ of individual visitors across multiple visits or pageviews and is a pretty complex task (if at all possible) when working with session based, aggregate Analytics Tools.

This is a trivial example of how visitor level Behavioral Segmentation in Digital Analytics trumps session level, aggregate Analytics hands down. Once the realization has set in about the art of possible and of course the homework has been done in developing a clear understanding of efforts/rewards with Visitor Analytics, the next step should be to run a small pilot to validate the assumptions and see some actual data about incremental performance improvements. Again, you need some serious governance and data capabilities to roll out Visitor Analytics on a larger scale but it helps to be able to walk before you can run.

Do you struggle with understanding the behavior of your visitors at a segment level? Find out more about how we can help you with your Web Analytics initiatives using Behavioral Segmentation of visitor level Digital Channel data.