What is Visitor Segmentation and How Will it Help Me?
Matt Hopkins posted in Visitor Segmentation, Web Analytics on July 8th, 2007
When looking at the topic of web analytics you will no doubt run into something called visitor segmentation. This is really just looking at different behaviours of the visitors that come to your website.
I’ll explain it a bit further by using the analogy of a TV programme we have here in the UK called Big Brother (BB). Personally I’m not a great fan of the show but hopefully it’s something that people can relate to.
In BB there are a number of people that live in a house for a period of 8 weeks or so, this house is covered with cameras so that everything that happens in the house can be monitored. In the same way a website can record everything that happens when someone is on the site using page tags or web server log files.
Within the BB house people move from room to room, they chat to each other and group together, they might swim in the pool or eat some food. All of this behaviour is tracked by the house cameras and then analysed later by psychologists and the public. On your website you can identify which pages people go to, whether they fill out a form or even if they play a Flash game and get the highest score. This site activity is then later analysed to identify behaviour patterns, the most popular types of content among other things.
So what’s the point of this analysis?
The result of BB is that Endemol, the programme creators earn money from a variety of sources including public phone voting, advertising and television appearances. Also the main purpose of commercial websites is to generate revenue by interacting with website visitors and getting them to part with their cash in a variety of ways including purchasing products, services or clicking on advertising.
And where does visitor segmentation come into it?
Well, for BB they need to identify people within the house that do similar activities be that talking on the sofa or eating all the time. Then after grouping these people they can identify which behaviours are the most popular with the public and cause Endemol to generate the most amount of money. Once this has been achieved they can plan what type of people they need to recruit for next year’s show. We are now on BB 8 and we can see that the housemates have become more and more irritating with each iteration of the show, but maybe that’s what generates interest in the show and so creates more revenue.
And on your website you can group visitors by their online behaviour like which content types they consume, whether they comment on articles or come back to the site on a regular basis. Once you have identified these groups of people you can then see which generate the most revenue for you and attract more visitors like this via your marketing campaigns, or maybe create more content that satisfies your revenue generating groups.
So in essence visitor segmentation is about group people who act in similar ways and then if you can make one person in each group happier then you can hopefully please most of the people in each group and ultimately generate more revenue/interest/brand awareness. Of course it is never that simple as people are notoriously unpredictable but habits do form over time and so it is possible to capitalise on these.
Happy segmenting!
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