Evaluate Your Website’s Success with Data Segmentation

Now that we’re able to establish our business objective, see how our website will accomplish it, and set up the tracking to measure it, now we can know how to evaluate our website’s success.

This is a portion of a talk I gave at WordCamp Atlanta in 2019. You can watch the entire presentation on WordPress TV: Get the Most Out of Your Website: Measure Everything.

Because you set up tracking, you now see your report in Google Analytics. Let’s say you’ve got 100 visitors from Google organic search. Let’s say those 100 visitors became 3 leads. Is that good? I’d take three leads. Could it be better? The numbers don’t mean anything by themselves. We have to begin to segment our data.

Data segmentation might sound complicated. It’s really simple. When you segment data you’re limiting the data to specific dimensions. When you limit your data with dimensions, you can understand it better. Let me give you an example of common ways you might segment your data. That might make this more clear.

Measure Success with Date Segmentation

One way to segment data is by dates. What if you’ve got three leads as a result of 100 visits this month, but you got 10 leads as a result of 300 visitors last month? Thanks to segmenting your data by date, you’re able to decide whether the three is good or bad. Three doesn’t mean anything unless you have something against which you can compare it.

Measure Success by Source Segmentation

One of the most common ways to compare data is by using a date comparison. Another way is source of the traffic. Let’s say you got 100 visits from your Google organic search traffic. At the same time, you know that, you got five visits from your Facebook ads. Which was more effective? By segmenting the data, you now know, especially when you’re able to go the primary objective and see that Facebook brought no conversions, the Google organic brought a bunch, right? Segmenting the data according to the source of the traffic helps you to compare. Now you know: double-down on your SEO. Maybe you either need to completely revamp your Facebook ads or stop giving Zuckerberg any more money. But you won’t know whether it’s successful or not unless you’re able to segment the data by the traffic.

Measure Success with Location Segmentation

Another important segment is location. If you are a local dog walker, it doesn’t matter if someone in L.A. comes to your website, because you’re in Atlanta. But if you look at your data by location, suddenly that matters.

Measure Success by New or Returning Visitors

Another way you might look is new versus returning. For instance, organic search does a really good job bringing new visitors. Social does a really good job bringing returning visitors. But of the newer returning visitors, which are more likely to convert? Not everyone converts on the first visit. So, now you can look at the primary tracked goal of your website that helps accomplish your business objective in terms of these segments.

Use all the Segments!

You can also combine segments. Your Google search traffic from last month brought in more leads from your hometown than it did the previous month. Now you’ve combined all your segments and you know what is working. You know where to spend your money. You know where to stop spending your money. That is the real power of measuring everything off your website.