How can Segmentation by Referral/Traffic source propel businesses?

One important factor in analytics is understanding the consumer’s journey through the site and what affects certain behaviors. There is far more to a visitor’s point of entry than just calculating it as a simple visit or page view and the information regarding how the consumer initially got to the site is equally just as important. In fact, when done well, this data can provide an ROI back to any existing marketing campaigns in play.

For example, email campaigns, social media sites, affiliates, display ads, direct traffic, and search engines (paid and organic) are all referral points to websites.

(Chaffey, 2016)

Segmentation also offers a snapshot into how many visitors are continual visitors versus new users, what technology sources they are using to enter the site, and what browser type they are using (and if they are coming in on mobile devices). All of this information gives a high level snapshot into the consumers first or continual exposure to the brand.

For the sake of this review, we will focus on the referral/traffic source. There are many companies who are studying this particular feature in great detail and tying it in with the psychographic and demographic detail of the audiences to be able to effectively build campaigns with messaging tailored to the right audience, in the right way, at the right time.

For instance, Lenovo machines found that 40 percent of their online traffic were visitors they did not know and knew it was going to be fairly difficult to sell equipment to them not understanding how to effectively communicate to them. They wanted to speak to this new consumer and needed to be able to shift their messaging and content within the site when these consumers visited.

Lenovo broke their audiences into multiple profiles, identified by interests, likes, etc. and used cross-categorization data from the referral sites to serve up specific content when certain audiences visited the web page. These weren’t landing pages, but content buckets on the home page that spoke clearly to the right audience.

The results created a 40 percent lift in website order conversions and a 25 percent revenue increase per order. Creating these audience profiles are important for all brands, as an effective content strategy includes a descriptive and detailed understanding of the audience. Only when brands and businesses understand what the consumer is about can they effectively provide the right content to their audience and drive deeper interest and conversions. (“When we,” 2016)

The referral source is extremely important - whether it’s from an ongoing effort by the company, direct traffic, a true referral partner (news sites, blogs, vendors, etc.), or organic and paid search, understanding the background behind how the consumer got to the site is very important.  This tracking must be in place in order to effectively serve up the right content to the right audience.

Within the example from Lenovo, there are a few specific analytics elements that were analyzed and adjusted to better answer the consumer needs:

·      How many visitors were new visitors versus repeating visitors – (visitors/unique visitors – foundational)

·      Where the visitors where entering the site from – (referral – visitor characterization)

·      How many sales resulted from the updates to the content – (conversion – conversion)

Chaffey, D. (2016, April 5). How to use (Advanced) Segments in Google Analytics. Retrieved from http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-segmentation/segmenting-google-analytics/

When we customized our homepage offers with Neustar audience data, we saw over 40% lift in conversion rate! (n.d.). Retrieved May 30, 2016, from https://www.neustar.biz/resources/client-stories/activation/lenovo-customer-segmentation-website-personalization.pdf