How to view Google Analytics Funnels for Segmented Data

Posted: February 24, 2009

The Goal Funnel Visualization is a critical report in Google Analytics. This report will you see where users are abandoning your conversion activities.

For example, if you had a 3 page form fill, wouldn’t it be useful if you could see:

Page 1 – 100% enter
Page 2 – 80% enter
Page 3 – 30% enter
Goal completion: 2%

What that data shows you is that consumers are moving down the early stage of the funnel, but there is a large drop off later in the funnel. This is a perfect place to examine for usability, informational, and other issues to see why there is such a large conversion abandonment.

One of the best uses of the funnel (and many of Google’s other charts) is first segmenting users to see how that user type interacts with your site.

For example, you could view your stats only when:

Visitors are from a social network site
The user converted on your site
A user came from an expensive banner ad you’re testing
The user is on a mobile device
The user is in California
The user came from a particular search engine
The user came from a paid search campaign
The user bought a specific product
The user came from an email campaign
etc…

By only looking at segmented data, you could see that banner 1 is profitable, and RSS advertising isn’t leading to a high engagement. This level of detail will let you tailor your site to visitor types, but also allow you to make better decisions about which ad types are profitable. Understanding if that the $15k/month banner you’re buying from a site is leading to solid traffic is an insight that will help you make better advertising decisions.

The biggest issue with segmentation on Google Analytics? It doesn’t work with certain reports:

If you are trying to view reports that can not be segmented, there is a way around this issue.

Create a new analytics profile
Edit settings for that profile
Go to the filter settings of that profile
Create a new custom filter
In the filter field, choose campaign source, medium, or however you’re tagging your URLs

If you don’t know how to tag your URLs for Google Analytics, use Google’s URL builder tool.

Save the filter
Repeat the above step as necessary if you want new sources of traffic added to that profile

Now, that profile in Google Analytics will only contain traffic from that particular source. The biggest drawback is that this will not let you see data back in time. Google profiles only contain data from the day you set the up. However, now you can view the Goal Funnel, and any advanced reports just for traffic from a certain source.

You could set this up so that one profile is just your Google AdWords data, and another is just your Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft adCenter data. What to look at organic conversions from just Google, or just Yahoo? You can use a custom profile to see which search engine sends you higher converting traffic.

My favorite use is one profile for bought traffic, and another for each high priced banner or email ad. You could even just see how your email lists are performing by just looking at traffic derived from particular email campaigns.

Make sure you can analyze your data and traffic properly. Custom filters and profiles will give you fantastic insight into your customers to help you make better advertising decisions, but to have the data to know where you need to work for increasing conversion rates.

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