Understanding your customers is key to improving your eCommerce business. Google Analytics allows you to build strategic customer segments that can be shared and targeted with emails or ads. Here’s how you can do it:

Demographic Segmentation

Start with the basics. Age, gender, income, occupation, and education level can all provide insights into purchasing power and preferences. Under the “Audience > Demographics” section in Google Analytics, you can view and segment your audience based on these variables.

Geographic Segmentation

Where your customers are located can affect their purchasing behavior. The “Geo” section under “Audience” will provide insights about the location of your customers. Use this information to tailor your offerings and messaging.

Behavioral Segmentation: Purchasing Behavior

Segment customers based on their purchasing behavior. Under “Conversions > Ecommerce”, you can view and segment your audience based on their buying behavior, such as “frequent buyers” and “infrequent buyers”.

Behavioral Segmentation: Product Usage

Google Analytics also allows you to segment users based on the products they interact with. This can be found under “Behavior > Events” for the actions users take with specific products or categories.

Behavioral Segmentation: Customer Engagement

Assess how engaged your customers are. Metrics like session duration, pages per session, and bounce rate (found under “Audience > Behavior”) can help you create segments like “highly engaged” and “low engagement”.

Psychographic Segmentation

While Google Analytics doesn’t directly provide psychographic data, you can infer some insights based on users’ interests under “Audience > Interests”. You can segment your audience based on these inferred interests, attitudes, and lifestyle choices.

Customer Journey Stage

Understand where customers are in the buying cycle. Google Analytics’ “Multi-Channel Funnels” under “Conversions” can help you segment users based on their stage in the buying cycle.

Product or Category Preferences

Segment your customers based on their product or category preferences. This can be done by reviewing the “Ecommerce” reports and analyzing the product performance data.

Channel Preference

Under “Acquisition”, you can find insights about how users arrive at your site. Segment your users based on their preferred channels, such as organic search, paid search, direct, social, email, etc.

Loyalty

Under “Audience > Behavior > New vs Returning”, you can segment your audience based on how long they’ve been customers and whether they’re repeat buyers or one-time shoppers.

RFM Segments: Recency

Group customers based on when their last purchase was. This can be done by looking at the “Time since last session” under “Audience > Behavior”.

RFM Segments: Frequency

Analyze how often customers purchase from you. This can be done by reviewing the “Frequency & Recency” report under “Audience > Behavior”.

RFM Segments: Monetary

Look at how much customers spend on your website. This can be found under “Conversions > Ecommerce > Sales Performance”.

Building Custom Segments

Once you’ve decided on your segments, you can build custom segments in Google Analytics. You can find this feature under “+ Add Segment” on almost every report.

Sharing Segments

After creating your segments, you can share them with other Google products. Simply click “Actions > Share” on the custom segment you want to share.

17. Targeting Your Segments

Once your segments are set up and shared, the next step is to target them with ads or emails. Google Analytics offers a robust set of tools to analyze and segment your users, and create Google Ads remarketing audiences. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to leverage your CRM data to create Google Ads remarketing audiences in Google Analytics:

• Step 1: Configure your account: Link your Google Ads account, create user-scoped dimensions and a data set, and upload your user data​.
• Step 2: Update your tracking code: Enable the remarketing display feature, and send user-scoped data with hit data​​.
• Step 3: Analysis and taking action: Analyze user data to create user segments, and export the remarketing audience to Google Ads. This can be done by creating a custom report and a segment in Google Analytics​.

By building strategic customer segments in Google Analytics, you can better understand your eCommerce customers’ behaviors and preferences. Armed with this knowledge, you can tailor your marketing strategies to meet their needs, improving your overall business performance. I hope you find this article helpful. Understanding your customers is key to improving your eCommerce business, and Google Analytics is a powerful tool to help you achieve this.