Segments
Overview
In Google Universal Analytics a segment is a subset of your Analytics data, with Segments allowing for users to isolate and analyze those subsets of data so you can examine and respond to the component trends within their digital properties.
A segment is made up of one or more non-destructive filters (filters that do not alter the underlying data). Those filters allow organizations to isolate subsets of users, sessions, and/or hits.
Google defines users, sessions, and hits within Google Universal Analytics as follows:
Users: People interact with your digital property (e.g., your website or app)
Sessions: Interactions by a single user are grouped into sessions
Hits: Interactions during a session are referred to as hits. Hits include interactions like pageviews, events, and transactions.
As such, a single user can have multiple sessions, and each session can have multiple hits. This page outlines how using Segments, you can identify the impact UGC has on your Users, their Sessions, and any Hits.
Defining Segments
The first step in leveraging Segments in your Google Universal Analytics reporting is to define a Segment. To do this, select Add a Segment from any standard report within your Google Universal Analytics instance and then pick New Segment.
From here you will be presented with the opportunity to define your Segment and identify which Users have interacted with a UGC Widget.
Now as UGC Widgets fire events to Google Universal Analytics whenever a User interacts with them, to define our UGC Segment we will want to pick Conditions under the Advanced header on the left-hand, menu.
From here we can start to define what conditions we wish to consider when determining that someone has interacted with a UGC Widget, picking either Event Action or Event Category as the condition type and then defining the condition parameters. To view the default parameters for UGC Events generated by Google Universal Analytics, click here.
Now in the above example, we have simply defined all the generic Event Action created by the Nosto's UGC Google Universal Analytics plugin to define our segment. The conditions added are:
Event Action contains 'Load' OR
Event Action contains 'Load more' OR
Event Action contains 'Tile expand' OR
Event Action contains 'ShopSpot flyout' OR
Event Action contains 'ShopSpot action click' OR
Event Action contains 'Pin click' OR
Event Action contains 'Share click' OR
Event Action contains 'Product action click' OR
Event Action contains 'Username or handle click'
Naturally, you can pick and choose what Events you feel are relevant for your reporting, as well as any custom events that you may be tracking from the Widget. You can also mix with Event Category data if you only want to report on the performance of a particular Widget and/or Filter.
Once you are happy with your Segment, you can now hit Save
Resources
To help make it easier to segment those Users, Sessions, and Hits where someone has engaged with a Visual UGC Widget, Visual UGC has created an Engagement & Conversion Segment which you can easily import into your Google Universal Analytics instance.
General Reports
Pre-defined Segments in Google Universal Analytics can be applied to any of the standard reports which are available under the following sections:
Audience
Acquisition
Behavior
Conversions
Simply add you're pre-defined or imported Segment to the report and Google Universal Analytics will automatically update the report to display the Visual UGC data relative to your entire audience similar to the screenshot below:
Once applied, to turn this into a custom report, you can hit the Save icon in the top right-hand corner of the page, which will add it to your Custom Reports.
E-commerce
Adding pre-defined Segments in Google Universal Analytics to your E-commerce and Enhanced E-commerce reports is the same approach as adding a segment to any General Report. Simply add you're pre-defined or imported Segment to the report and Google Universal Analytics will automatically update the report to display the Visual UGC data relative to your entire audience similar to the screenshot below:
The report types that support applying a segment relating to Visual UGC include:
Overview
Shopping Behaviour
Checkout Behaviour
Product Performance
Sales Performance
Product List Performance
Details about the types of insights you can get out of each report relating to Visual UGC are listed below under their respective headings.
Shopping Behaviour
The Shopping Behaviour Analysis report lets you see the number of sessions that included each stage of your purchase funnel, how many sessions continued from one step to the next, and how many abandoned the funnel at each stage.
By leveraging segments, customers can see whether those individuals who interact with the Visual UGC Widget progress through the purchase funnel with a higher completion rate or if there are any other trends/insights given around how they move through the process.
Checkout Behaviour
The Checkout Behaviour Analysis report lets you see how successfully your users moved through your checkout process. The checkout funnel visualization illustrates how many users moved on from one step to the next, how many abandoned the process at each step, and how many entered the process at each step.
Similar to the Shopping Behaviour Analysis report, once paired with segments, organizations can understand if the Visual UGC Widgets help push people through to the completion of this process.
Product Performance
The Product Performance report lets you see how your products performed from two different points of view:
Summary: Product performance in terms of revenue, price, and quantity. Includes two of the Shopping Behavior metrics.
Shopping Behaviour: Product performance in terms of user engagement with your products (e.g., viewing products and details, adding and removing products from carts, completing checkouts).
The Summary view includes the following metrics: Sales Performance
Product Revenue (revenue from individual product sales)
Unique Purchases
Quantity (number of units sold)
Average Price (average revenue per product)
Average Quantity
Product Refund Amount (amount returned to users as refunds)
Shopping Behaviour
Cart-to-Detail Rate (number of products added per number of product-detail views)
Buy-to-Detail Rate (number of products purchased per number of product-detail views)
The Shopping Behaviour view includes the following metrics: Sales Performance
Product List Views
Product Detail Views
Product Adds (to carts)
Product Removes (from carts)
Product Checkouts
Unique Purchases
Shopping Behaviour
Cart-to-Detail Rate (number of products added per number of product-detail views)
Buy-to-Detail Rate (number of products purchased per number of product-detail views)
Sales Performance
The Sales Performance report lets you evaluate sales by either of two primary dimensions:
Transaction (date, time, transaction ID)
Date (cumulative transaction data by date)
The Sales Performance report includes the following metrics:
Revenue (total revenue from e-commerce transactions; depending on your implementation, this can include tax and shipping)
Tax (total tax charges for e-commerce transactions)
Shipping (total shipping charges for e-commerce transactions)
Refund Amount (Currency amount refunded for a transaction)
Quantity (number of units sold in e-commerce transactions)
Product List Performance
Product Lists represent a logical grouping of products on your site. You can use them to represent:
Catalog pages
Cross-sell blocks
Up-sell blocks
Related-products blocks
Search results pages
The Product List Performance report lets you see how the Product Lists on your site performed based on the following metrics:
Product List Views (number of times users viewed products when they appeared in the product list)
Product List Clicks (number of times users clicked products when they appeared in the product list)
Product List CTR (the rate at which users clicked the product list to view products (number of clicks divided by the number of times the list appeared)
