Charles Thrasher has a great post about segmentation and Microsoft Analytics. It’s well written and a must-read for any analyst and web marketer. Often the basic setup is a pain, but can pay out big:
“One superficial but effective tactic is to program your web page to insert the keyword as a page title. In our example, the page title generated by this bit of coding, properly capitalized, would be “Award Winning Widgets.” Going a step further, you can make some assumptions about their intent based upon their keyword. They may be comparing your widgets with your competitors so you write a paragraph about your product’s competitive advantages and dynamically insert it into your landing page whenever the URL includes that keyword.
Does it work? You’ll have to test your changes against the original, unchanged landing page. AdCenter Analytics will tell you if your modified page prompts more visitors to do what you hoped they’d do-buy your products, request your information, or subscribe to your newsletter. If they do, you have a winner. If not, at least you know what doesn’t work and that has value, too.
Segmenting Three Deep
It’s a good suggestion to segment any key performance indicator to a level three deep in order to understand the meaning of the statistic in greater detail. We’ve already segmented by search engine referrer and by keyword but what if your ad group has several different ads, each with different ad copy and a slightly different appeal? Wouldn’t it be helpful to know which ad is driving sales and which is simply costing you money?
It’s almost a trivial matter for you to add another adCenter parameter to your destination URLs which now looks like this:
www.example.com/LandingPage.html?keyword={Keyword}&adid={AdID}
Now the same keyword can be tracked separately for each ad, providing insight into the effectiveness of your ad copy. What could be more actionable than knowing which ad is generating revenue-and how much?”
Entire segmentation post here
