Complete Web Monitoring

Segmentation

As we’ve discussed, web monitoring isn’t just about collecting visit data, it’s about segmenting those visits in useful ways to see what’s working better or worse. Many of the dimensions along which you want to segment are contained in a single tool—you can segment goals by referring sites within an analytics tool directly. But what if you want to segment data in one tool by a dimension that’s only available in another?

Let’s say you’d like to know whether people who submit feedback on your site through a VOC survey are less likely to buy something. You can approach this in several ways. You can store both VOC and analytics data in a central data warehouse, then analyze it later. Or you can modify your VOC tool to send a message to the analytics service that marks the visit as belonging to someone who has been surveyed, then segment conversion rates by this marking.

Measuring the impact of page load times on conversions is another obvious example that requires cooperation between several systems. You may want to answer questions that require even subtler segmentation—for example, do people who scroll all the way to the bottom of the page have a faster page load time?

To do this after the fact, you need to compute the new segments from individual visits and pages that your systems monitored, which means storing all visit data somewhere.