Segmenting Your Local Search Traffic in Google Analytics

You can segment any number of things in Google Analytics, but how do you identify the important ones to look at? It really comes back to your business needs and KPI’s (key performance indicators).

A while back, I wrote a post on segmenting social media traffic in Google Analytics, followed by a local search checklist that everyone should use as a guide for local search optimization. Today I’m here to tie the segmentation aspect to local search and hopefully this will provide some great insights into how you should look at your data.

Segmenting keywords by location

There are 3 types of reporting methods you can use here:

1. Advanced segments in  Google analytics profile;
2. Filtered profile; and,
3. Custom reporting for a specific location.

TIP: if you are ‘still’ unsure of all the possible location keyword around your area, use this nifty local keyword research tool to build out your list of keywords. Consider words like zip codes and abbreviations for all the areas you serve.

(1) Advanced Segments

Advanced segments will allow you to slice your data into different groups, which then becomes their own set of people who have similar characteristics that came to your site. In this case we are looking at the organic keywords that contain ‘houston’ in it. Here is how your advanced segment would look:

Tip: you can group your locations and include additional terms by using regular expressions.

(2) Filtered profile

You can setup a separate profile for each of your locations. For example, if one of your shops is in Houston, and other one is in New York, then you can create two new profiles and filter traffic from those locations by city. The benefit of this is that, you could assign a user to a particular profile. This would be the case if the office manager in the Houston office asks for all their data in their area. In that case, you could create a filter to include City = Houston and that should do it for them.

(3) Custom reporting (by location)

If you haven’t look into custom reporting yet, you should! One of the more powerful tools in Google Analytics is this feature that brings you what you want. It requires you to create this report once, and you could modify it later, change date ranges, and you have all your raw metrics there. Here is how we would set up a custom report to report on organic keywords containing ‘houston’.

Note: due to personalization in search results, we’ve seen many users search the product or service name alone without a mention of the city name in the search query. The numbers displayed might be low as a result of this. To remedy this, you can look at removing the keyword containing ‘houston’ and instead add a filter to include city = Houston.

One Last Tip…

Larger franchises have a much better recognition of their brand name. This means; their brand name is search highly. In order to narrow our focus on acquiring new eye balls on our service pages or menu, and then we would be required to exclude any keyword containing the brand name.

There a number of ways to evaluate your local search performance, and these are just three of them. Please share your thoughts and comments below.