Digging for Gold - Google Analytics Custom Segments

Do you know where your clients come from?  Which ones deliver the most conversions, or stay on your site the longest?  Most of my ecommerce clients have geographic "hot spots" - States or metro areas that deliver the bulk of their revenue.   So, we really need to keep a close watch on those visitor segments - something that isn't always easy when managing large PPC campaigns with dozens of campaigns and tens of thousands of keywords.

Google Analytics Custom Segments to the rescue!  By creating custom segments in Analytics, we can quickly isolate just the traffic from one state or a combination of states and watch traffic trends, bounce rates, conversion rates, etc.  Segments also allow us to keep an eye on all our "cse" medium traffic (comparison shopping engines) like Google Shopping, Shopzilla, BizRate, Nextag, Bing Shopping, etc.  simply by pulling down our pre-defined advanced segment called "CSE Traffic".

We can quickly see if there are any drop offs or spikes in traffic, how this segment relates to other segments or "all visits", etc.  It's a real time saver.

Advanced segments are not only useful for zeroing in on specific traffic sources and visitor types, but also important landing pages of your website.   There is almost no limit to the custom combinations that can be created with segments. 

Happy analyzing!