New segmentation features: landing/exit pages, number of actions

November 4, 2009

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We’re launching some really great new segmentation features today:

Filter by landing page
Filter by exit page
Filter by number of actions (exactly 1, greater than 10, etc)
View top pages, landing pages, and exit pages for any segment of visitors
This is of course all available in the analytics API too

Let’s run through an example for getclicky.com’s traffic. Note that some of these screenshots are edited to save space.

First, let’s analyze our home page. Before this new update, all we could do was filter by visitors who had seen home page at any point during their session, like this:

But now we can filter down to only visitors who actually began their visit on our homepage. These are who we really want to look at. This is more likely to be “new” visitors, as they wouldn’t be coming from bookmarks to pages within our site or anything like that:

Based on the average actions and time per visit for this second group, it’s obvious these people aren’t as engaged as the first group. Perfect, that’s who we want. Ok, let’s look at the top exit pages for these visitors, which will show us where we lost the most visitors:

But is this the data we really want? This includes people who came to our homepage, perhaps logged in and viewed 1,000 reports, then logged out and left. We don’t want these people included here. So, let’s add a “number of actions” filter and set it “less than 5”. This will now mainly be people who are not engaged with our web site at all.

As you can see, the average time and actions is now way less than it was before. Now let’s look at the top exit pages. It’s about the same, actually. The numbers have gone down on all of them, but the actual top exit pages, and their order, is about the same. But that’s fine – we can still look at specific data for this segment of visitors, such as top goals completed, or goals started but incompleted, to get some more data from them. Or even view the individual visitor sessions that interest us.

I won’t go any further with this example, but as you can see, the paths of exploration are endless from this point. I hope it gives an idea of the powerful filtering you can do with these new features.

Here’s one other quick example: Top landing and exit pages for everyone who arrived via search.