With just a couple of days until the World Athletics championships in Russia and our golden duo of Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis-Hill competing again we were wondering what they have done in their preparation for this championship to ensure that they perform just as they did in the Olympics.

Similarly, what actions do you take to make sure your marketing performs for your business. Here is one thing that most businesses miss that will help you go the distance.

If you speak to any athlete or professional sports coach the first thing that they do after a performance is look at it over and over again. They pick out the good parts and the bad parts so they know what needs to be worked on more for the next competition. You need to do the same with your marketing, once you have completed a campaign you need to dissect it in its parts and work out the good the bad and the ugly.

The one tool that can help you do this when you are looking at online campaigns is web analytics, now most of you I’m sure take a look at these numbers from time to time…. but how many of you take advantage of Advanced Segments?

What are Advanced Segments?

It’s quite simple really they allow you to isolate a segment of your traffic and compare that segment with others. There are some pre-defined ones already waiting for you to use such as paid for traffic, traffic with conversions and that type of thing. But you can also create your own, so for example if you are marketing a specific area you can isolate the traffic that campaign generated. You can then take it one step further and add another segment, for example from this specific area you can identify if any of them have made a purchase. This can give you a really good indication of whats happening on your website. You can see Googles explanation here:

[youtube id=”Q1aCmHYkIsI” width=”600″ height=”350″]

There are some really good advanced segments you can use, convertors by visit count will tell you how many times people visit your site before they take your predefined action. Keyword length segment, this will identify keywords that perhaps lend themselves to different parts of your sales funnel and if you have an ecommerce cart you can see who abandoned your shop from which traffic sources.

All of these advanced segments (and there are many more!) will help you get more out of your Google analytics account.

Even if your discipline is the 100m sprint and its over in 10 seconds flat, to go the distance you need to review your past to improve the future, same is true for your marketing!