Visitor ratings and segmentation

You can easily tap into your quality visitors by segmenting them according to different quality criteria. Visitor ratings allow you to put minimum and maximum requirements for visits and their duration. The more quality criteria a visitor fulfills, the better he/she matches a certain segment. The quality is expressed through an arbitrary number, which defines how valuable the criterion is. Some of the available quality criteria include:

various entry methods
the number of visits or page views
the number of visits to a certain page or section
the amount of time spent on the site
the visit's geographical location (country or region)
organization type (company, ISP, educational establishment, government)

You can view the results of which visitors match a segment by going to the Target Group Report after making your first Rating group. The Visitor Rating essentially works as a shortcut, giving you immediate access to the segment that interests you.

Create a new Rating group

Begin the segmentation by pressing Visitor rating from the settings.

Rating group:

Begin adding a new Rating group by naming it. The Rating group can correspond to any visitor segment, group or campaign that you are interested in. Some examples of Rating groups could be "Visitors showing interest in our 3-for-1 campaign", "Kitchen appliances", "German visitors" or "Competitors".

After adding the group, please press Rules (see image 1).

Image 1. Defining rules for a particular Rating group

Rules:

A Rating group consists of at least one rule, which then can be divided into several different conditions (see image 2). The visitor will be rated if they fulfill all conditions within a rule. You can create rules pertaining both to desired and non-wanted visitor behaviour.

The more conditions you add to a rule, the more difficult it will be for a visit to match up to it.

Image 2. One rule can be made up of one or more conditions

Conditions:

Positive rating

Reward plus points to desired visitor behaviour. Do this by selecting conditions that match high visitor quality or some other interesting segment. A portion of the available conditions can bee seen in image 2.

Search term: If you use a search term as a rule, you can utilize the percent sign as a wild card to allow some variation (sing., plur. etc.) . For example %machine% would cover both new machines and machine maintenance.

Page: If you use a page as a rule, A) use the page's www-address if the page has no &page_name= parametre, e.g. www.company.com. B) If the page has a Page name, use it, e.g. Front page.

Negative rating

Give minus points to non-wanted visitor behaviour. By placing a minus mark in front of the points, e.g. -5, you can deduct points from behaviour that matches low visitor quality or that fits the segment poorly.

Rejecting a visit from the rating

Another option is to discard a visit altogether (reject visit), which means that the visit will not be taken into account in the rating. For example, you can choose to reject visits from your own staff or your own distributors by giving them the rating "is from the organization" or "is from the IP address" and filling in ther company name (as seen through Snoobi) or their IP address.

Image 3. A rule receives points according to how valuable a certain behaviour is. A visit can also be rejected -> visitors who fulfill the rule will not be visible in the results

Rating according to country or region

From the rules tab you can set which country or region the new rules apply for. By default the rule applies to visitors from all countries.

Image 4. A rating group with three rules. Two of the rules contain two conditions, a visit must pass both to get rated

Rating according to organization type

The Organizations tag allows you to select which types of organizations are included or excluded from the group (companies, ISPs, educational establishments, government).

Points (pts):

The point scale is entirely up to your own choosing, it can range from 1 to 1000. You can also give minus points for non-wanted actions, such as - 20 pcs for less than 2 page views.

All of the points are summed together in the end. The more points a visit receives, the better it fits into your Rating group's segment.

Rating example

Let's say we're a company selling home appliances and we want to attract attention to our latest "Buy 3 get 1 for free" campaign.

We'll call the rating group "Potential customers for our 3 for 1 campaign".

For simplicity's sake, we decide to give this Rating a short scale, 1-10 points.

Rule 1:
— A logical condition would be that we want the visitor to visit the section called "3-for-1", which provides information about the campaign
— To ensure that the visitor is truly interested and won't leave the site quickly, we create a second condition stipulating that the visitor must make a minimum of 10 page views / visit.

Rating -> We decide to give this rule a full 5 points (pts), because this is a rule that should correspond really well to people interested in our campaign.
Rule 2:

— We also want to become aware of those visitors who browse new household appliances so that we can target them with direct marketing concerning our campaign. This is why we create the condition that a visit must reach the Section "Home appliances".

Rating -> This visitor is not as likely to be interested in our campaign as the first visitor was, so we decide to give them a lower rating, 3 pts.

Rule 3:

— As organization type we only select companies, because there is no gain in sending out direct marketing to Internet Service Providers

Rule 4:

— Finally, we open the Country panel to limit the ratings to UK visitors only. Since our company can't ship campaign products abroad, we're uninterested in the visitors from other countries.

End result: A lead list for potential UK customers for the "3 for 1" campaign.

The visit will receive its points 30 minutes after the visitor has made his or her latest page load. This ensures that no points are assigned until the visit has fully ended.

Target points:

You may define target points from the Rating group's main view. The "optimal" level for the target points will come with experience once there is data showing what the score tends to be for those visitors who display desired behaviour. For example, if visitors scoring 20 or more points generally become customers, then 20 might be a good target.

The point distribution spreadsheets behind the icon can be of help when determining the optimal target points.

If not enough visitors seem to be getting through all the rules, lower the target points or make less demanding rules.

Using the Rating groups in the report

You can access the created Rating Groups though the Target Group Report. Use the Rating Group as one variable when making a search »