“Real visitor based segmentation” – which only a handful of the Analytics Vendors provide at the moment – raise beyond the technology some exciting Marketer / Analyst questions as well.

It is a common understanding that segmentation is fundamental in conducting in depth analysis of web analytics data in today’s online marketing industry (and this definitely includes those who have revenue income based on affiliation – where conversion on high value items is NOT done in the same visit session). Leveraging segmentation allows one to answer ever more complex questions that originally stem from basic reporting.

In more report focused tools (e.g. Google Analytics), visit segmentation might require defining all aspects of the report result in advance or it would require the reprocessing of data to create the desired segments.

Truly flexible tools allows exploration of the data by defining and evaluating segments in Real-Time. Keeping this in mind moving forward, I have been quite interested in keeping this vision about being able to provide results in Real-Time no matter what the analyst question is. So moving on forward from here and into “Real visitor based segmentation” I see two roads one can take - but before describing these I would like to make sure we don’t muddle up the visitor segment concept with basic “fake” visitor segmentation, providing aggregated metrics, such as lifetime customer value etc. We are talking about system wide “Real visitor based segmentation”!

Given the segmentation example:

• Visitors from New York
• Who looked at the “IPOD” page
• But did not buy an IPOD product

And the Visitor behaviour:

• The Visitor visited the site and looked at the “IPOD” page February 15th 2006
• The Visitor bought the IPOD product on April 15th 2006

Applying the above visitor segment today (March 14th 2007) on a report (dataset) for Q1 2006 what is the result?

• A) The visitor is NOT included as he did NOT buy it in Q1 (Thus the segment is fixed and the results are always the same)
• B) the visitor IS included as he did eventually buy it (Thus the segment is floating and the result can vary)

In summary, would one want to, from an e.g. forward looking sales perspective, to choose solution B – the attitude of: he did eventually buy it and I do not want to market it to him again. OR would one want to, from an e.g. backward looking marketing perspective, to choose solution A – the attitude of direct ROI and the fact that I spent a fixed amount of money and had a fixed measurable Q1 result from it.

I have had exciting dialogues with friends, clients, prospects and colleagues about this over the lasts months and there are different opinions.

• A) Fixed visitor segments (the direct ROI attitude)
• B) Floating visitor segments (the forward looking sales attitude)

What do you think?