Segment by page type
Web AnalyticsLove it when web analytics data paints a clear picture (even if it is not a pretty one).
I was happily segmenting data in the quest for actionable insights when I came across segmentation by page type (hat tip to Gabriel), specifically for e-commerce sites. Outside of the homepage you typically have two main types in an online store:
- section/category pages and
- **item/product detail **pages
You should be able to tag/segment your data by page type with any web analytics package – if you have a Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Web Analytics you get the page type tagging out of the box (very cool).
Then pull up your top landing page report, segmented by page type and look at some conversion and revenue metrics. Where does most of your traffic land? On a section or item page? What is the conversion rate per page type?
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Answering these questions is inherently interesting, but the main value is to further segment by paid source, e.g. Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing.
In one particular case, I found that most Adwords traffic was being sent to section pages (not sure if this was intentional), but the data now shows me that sending folks to item pages could yield far better results:
Note that no matter what tool you use, you should be able to get this sort of data pretty easily as long as you have proper campaign tagging enabled.
Even if your data is not as clear-cut as in this example, you can now review your PPC strategy and make changes if necessary as you are in charge of specifying the landing page URLs.