Did your mother ever tell you not to compare yourself with others?
Well, her advice definitely does NOT apply in the realm of digital analytics! Here, we need to compare everything.
If I told you that the average bounce rate on my listings was 80%, what would you say?
Straight away, you’d start thinking about whether that’s good or bad. Even without being able to see my account, you’d still come up with an opinion. And it’s probably based on your own numbers or what you’ve heard from others.
In other words, you have to compare the bounce rate on my listings with other listings to make a judgement about it.
Three ways to compare
Dimensions
The dimensions (or rows) in your report is one way to compare a metric between two or more types of people, visits or pages. In the Geographic Location report, the default dimension shown is Country but you could also compare Cities or Continents. Or open a single Country to compare its states or regions.
Date Ranges
You can also compare date ranges, which is the best way to show whether your performance is improving over time.
Google Analytics Segments
Finally, you can try using Google Analytics Segments. These are an incredibly powerful way of comparing how different “slices” of your visitors behave, and can be applied to all of your reports and dashboards.
DO IT: Create a Shipping Destinations Segment
Do you ship to every single country in the world? Are there some places you just won’t mail a package? Or are you yet to discover the value of offering international shipping?
We’re going to create a segment showing visitors from countries you definitely ship to, so you can:
- Find out how your shop performs with visitors who are actually potential customers.
- See how many visitors are coming from other countries and whether you should consider more shipping options.
Create your segment
Bonus reading: Deep dive into segmentation
This kind of comparison is called “segmentation” and it is really the bread and butter of analysis. You can’t do without it!
If you’re stuck, confused or think a number is useless: segment it.
The Secret of Professional Analysts is Segmentation (and it’s easy!)
I think I’m lucky. I get to talk to people about digital analytics almost every day. (Hey, it’s fun for me, ok?) But over the years I’ve noticed something a bit silly. Everyone’s always talking about how to measure more stuff and see more reports. They need to capture every movement of every visitor.They want to…