Why You Need User Segmentation in Your Analytics

User segmentation can be easily understood as the process of grouping users together on the basis of shared properties or behaviors. This activity allows businesses to understand their users better, target their campaigns and activities more effectively, and act in phased manners to optimize time and money investment. In this article, we delve into the role that user segmentation can play in product analytics, and how their application can be maximized.

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Understanding User Segmentation

All the users of your app or website will, essentially, share some characteristics. They can be grouped on the basis of these shared traits into cohorts. These cohorts can then be applied to a host of analysis, enabling you to identify trends and patterns, target information toward specific cohorts, and update your product in line with the expectations of your ideal audience.

From empowering you to get a clear understanding of your users to engaging with different groups with better personalization, user segmentation is a key tool in a product manager’s arsenal when it comes to creating great products and boosting business growth.

Types of User Segmentation

To ensure that user segmentation is truly effective, it is important to segment users in a strategic manner. In Countly, we offer two types of user segmentation:

1. Property-based segmentation, which groups users on demographic, personal, regional, technical, and other similar properties (e.g., age, location, device, operating system, etc.).
2. Behavioral segmentation, which groups users on the basis of specific actions being performed or not performed (e.g., clicking on a specific CTA, clocking a specific session duration, triggering specific events, etc.)

The benefit of these two segmentation options is that user groups can be created with a high degree of specificity, allowing greater efficacy in engagement and analysis.

User Segmentation As a Part of Product Analytics

While user segmentation is an incredibly useful tool, it can be done through a few different ways. What works best, however, is if your user segmentation is done in a way that you can collect user data to influence it as well as use the segmentation to take action such as engagement and further analytics.

This is one of the reasons user segmentation is commonly seen as a feature in product and user analytics. It oftentimes is one of the first things that product managers set up when starting to use a product analytics tool.

In Countly, user segmentation is available under the Cohorts feature. Grouping users on the basis of properties or behaviors allows you to then apply this data to other features. For example:

• Combine Cohorts with Crashes/Errors to see which segments are being affected by technical issues faster, and assigning this to Engineering for rectification
• Combine Cohorts with Push Notifications to engage groups through personalized messages and campaigns
• Apply behavioral segmentation to Drill to dive into detailed information on specific groups
• Apply property-based segmentation as a filter when looking at data of visitor analytics, session analytics, events, and more

The key benefit of user segmentation being part of a wider range of product analytics features is that it allows you to do both - use data to develop the cohorts, and apply cohort or segmentation to get even more insights from other features.

Benefits of User Segmentation

The benefits of user segmentation can be seen across the width of an organization. Below is a list of potential advantages of including user segmentation in your product and customer analytics:

• Product teams choosing to release product updates to specific user groups to collect and act upon feedback before a full, public release
• Engineering teams seeing technical issues being faced by one group and not another
• Sales teams seeing revenue generation as a result of specific patterns versus others
• Marketing teams using personalized campaigns targeted at specific groups that gain better engagement than generic ones

All these benefits eventually lead to one primary advantage: higher retention through enhanced customer experiences, leading to higher revenues.

In conclusion, user segmentation is beneficial only when the understanding it provides can be applied to achieve business benefits including higher retention, higher engagement, more intuitive customer journeys, more personalized customer experiences, and higher customer loyalty.

Ensuring that you’re making the most of your cohorts’ analysis and application is integral to effectively using your product and user analytics. If you’d like to see this in action in Countly, talk to our analytics experts today!