I had a chat with E-Nor President Feras Alhlou after reading a guest post of his on the Official Google Analytics Blog. He was asked by Google to make a post, as E-Nor is a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and is very active on a number of Google Analytics (GA) support fronts.

The post in particular was about using advanced segments in Google Analytics when managing a successful eCommerce business. After breaking down a scenario with the CEO of a successful company requesting the numbers on sales between men’s products vs. women’s products, Alhlou offers three steps for obtaining information like this through GA (elaborated on in the post):

1. Find out if there is a unique URL identifier that distinguishes men’s and women’s products

2. Create two advanced segments based on the unique URL identifier: one for men’s products, and one for women’s products

3. Apply these segments to the reports to compare metrics/trends for each product category

Despite whether or not your business has already become successful, advanced segments are something you should probably be paying attention to.

"If a business is not measuring/tracking/trending/segmenting, I don’t know how they can remain in business, or at least remain competitive in business," Alhlou tells me. "Less successful businesses can/should leverage the power of GA/Advanced segments to understand which campaigns are bringing the ROI, what actions are visitors doing on their sites, what their engaged visitors do on their sites, etc."

"All of that is very doable, and more," he added. "It needs some commitment by the business to invest in their internal resources and/or bringing in an analytics consultant to help create an analytics culture and start improving things."

As traditional search engine optimization tactics become less reliable in an ever-changing world of how search results are delivered to us, analytics are going to be more important than ever for online businesses trying to get the most of out of their marketing efforts.

These are the kinds of things businesses are going to need to pay attention to. While they may seem obvious to the savvy web marketer, it is still clear that a lot of businesses trying to make it online are struggling to do so for lack of understanding of the tools available to them.