Events In Advanced Segments in Google Analytics

I’m not sure if I missed the official announcement, but I discovered the ability to add Event based dimensions and metrics to the Advanced Segments features of Google Analytics.
The enabing of this feature by the Google product team finally makes using Event Tracking an integral part of your analytics.

Event tracking in Google Analytics
In the past there was a large problem with Event Tracking, that very few people talked about surprisingly. See here’s the problem, when event tracking was first enabled it was heralded as the solution to fix issues with (eg) pageless websites, flash content - you could ‘enable event tracking without inflating your page view count’. Good stuff? Well, in a way yes - the problem with this solution was that the data was held in it’s own walled garden disconnected from other data.
A classic problem was that, let’s say you tracked all of your video with event tracking.
Implementation was improved - the multi-dimensional capabilities made it very easy for developers to code in labels, categories and actions, and then we’d have a nice way of drilling into our data to see how the different dimensions interacted.
Analysis wasn’t improved - But what about conversion? Everyone in the industry voices strong opinions (rightly so) about how we need to keep an eye on goals, registrations, downloads, orders, leads etc - but with event tracking this simply wasn’t possible:

Event Label Reporting in Google Analytics
See, that’s a pretty report? But it doesn’t tell us very much of anything useful. In the example above I have set event labels for video starts and completes - I can take this data out to Excel and calculate a video completion rate but beyond that the data is not much more than some eye candy. Without full integration to other data it’s kind of useless.
This is why we frequently cause confusion to developers by asking them to track non-page view events as page views (eg pdf download link) so we can use ‘events’ as goals. To a developer who is following a design schema this requirement makes no sense, and neither should it. We were hacking Google Analytics because of limitations like this.
So what have Google done? It’s now possible to access the Advanced Segments tool and access event based dimensions and metrics as part of your filter creation. In the example below I’ve created a simple video completed segment:

Creating Event Segments in Google Analytics
Now that we’ve looked at some of the problems of event tracking in the past, and looked at the new advanced segments capabilties for introducing events to the process it’s time to take a look at what we can do with the segments.
In the example below, for a different client with the same type of segment, I’ve applied the video completion segment and the all visits (control) segment to a goal conversion report. This is telling me that we appear to more than double the form completion rate when visitors complete a video.

Analysing Event based Segments - Goal Conversion

Testing Statistical Significance for our Segment
A quick test for statistical significance (using a homegrown Excel based significance calculator) tells us that this data is significant at 99%.
This is a good thing. We can now hypothesise that making an investment in optimising our web based video will lead to increased visitor conversion. From here we can develop test hypotheses around how and where video is placed and positioned around the site so we can develop a multi-variate test to optimise the number of visitors viewing and completing the video. It’s probably too small to see - but we have over 1 million visitors, of which only 20,000 completed the video. This is a huge opportunity!
With this in mind, here are a few other ideas on how you could use events in advanced segments to make your analytics actionable:
Create a segment to benchmark event completion (eg video completions) with other segments to help appraise the value of content and features.
Create an event based segment to allow events to be used to in goal completion analysis
Analyse multiple goal types in segments (eg game play, video start, widget click, ajax error) to be cross tabbed to determine their contribution to overall success
I hope this was useful. Please let me know if you find new and interesting ways to make your events, segments and goals data actionable.


Read more: http://insightr.com/blog/2009/7/8/how-to-guide-for-using-events-in-advanced-segments-for-googl.html#ixzz1p59P0fza