Have you ever looked at aggregated data in Google Analytics and wished there was a way to analyze individual audience segments? Google Analytics now makes this possible with advanced and custom segments.

Different types of visitors - whether new, returning, organic, or paid - behave differently to each other and have vastly different expectations. Advanced and custom segments can be a key tool to understand what your visitors want, and how to cater to them. Website owners tell us that they want data about audience segments that visit their site to improve their user experience and conversions.

You can take advantage of this new feature immediately with predefined segments (e.g. new visitors, paid search visitors, iPhone users). You can also tailor segments and create your own custom advanced segments. You can also share custom advanced segments with other users across accounts.

I've included below examples of advanced segments that I've found most helpful.

* Bounced visits

* Visits that dropped out of the funnel

* Brand keyword visits

* Brand keyword (organic) visits

* Brand keyword (paid) visits

* Non-brand keyword visits

* Non-brand (organic) visits

* Non-brand (paid) visits

* Visits from Country X

* First-time buy visits

* Return visit buys

Head over to the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog for even more.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer

Google Analytics recently announced a new set of features which builds on last year's enterprise-class feature launch. Some of these will add power to existing capabilities, like the ability to track mobile websites/apps and using an advanced table filter to perform data analysis. Other features will provide new flexibility to further customise and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of your business. These include the addition of custom variables to the tracking API and easier sharing of Custom Reports and Advanced Segments. Finally, the introduction of Analytics Intelligence allows users to set up specific alerts to signify changes in the data patterns of site metrics and dimensions over certain time periods. All these features nicely come under the mantra "Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent"

Come join Customer Solutions Engineer, Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, from our Southeast Asia office in a 45 minute webinar that will provide an overview and demonstration of these features so you can start using them for you and your clients today.

There will also be opportunity for Q&A, so please be sure to ask your questions beforehand through our Google Moderator event.

When: Friday 30th October 2009
Time: 11am Singapore and Malaysia, 10am Thailand, 2pm Sydney, 4pm New Zealand
Register for this event here

Posted by Jane Beaven, Third Party Training Manager APAC

AdWords reporting in Google Analytics helps online advertisers measure the impact of paid visitors to their site and business. The insights and actions based on these reports help search advertisers optimise their online campaigns, their overall site experience, and maximise their conversions. Recently, we've received questions from advertisers about why they see a discrepancy in their accounts between the number of Google Analytics visits and AdWords clicks.

There are a few reasons why this happens even if your Google Analytics implementation is correct. We've listed four steps below to help address this problem and keep discrepancies to a minimum.

* Step 1: Check that you have the basics covered. Check that you have linked the correct AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, applied cost data to the right profiles, and that auto-tagging has been enabled in the AdWords account.
* Steps 2 and 3: Identifying the culprits. Look through the AdWords reports to identify campaign and keyword landing pages that are contributing to the discrepancy.
* Step 4: Fix the problem. For each of the problematic landing pages check that:
o The correct Google Analytics Tracking Code is implemented
o The Google Analytics Tracking Code is in the right location in your HTML source code
o The auto-tagging parameter is present in the URL of the landing page that the visitor ends up on
o You are not using a combination of auto-tagging and manual campaign tracking parameters
o Paid visits are not being filtered out in your profile

You can learn more helpful best practices by reading the full guide on troubleshooting Google Analytics visits and AdWords clicks discrepancies.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer
This is a partial cross post from the Solutions for Southeast Asia Blog

Google Analytics is a powerful solution for discovering exactly how visitors reach your site and what keywords brought them to it. Online marketers and SEO specialists alike find keyword-level reporting useful to determine keywords that they are not advertising on but should be and keywords that they should be optimising their sites' content for.

Over at the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog, discover how to use Google Analytics to identify new high-performing keywords for your campaigns in seven simple steps. It begins with identifying converting organic keywords using your Google Analytics reports. Next, expand on those keywords using free tools such as Google Insights for Search, Google Trends, and Google Webmaster Tools. Finally, cross-segment those keywords against your paid ones to discover new keywords to leverage in your campaigns. Best of all, these keywords should bring you an additional conversion or two (and hopefully more!) and help increase your ROI. We even provide a simple spreadsheet template that helps you cross-segment these keywords easily.

You can be advertising on new keywords within 7 steps without even having to break a sweat. Start keyword-mining here.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer