Last week we rolled out Fairing’s Google Analytics integration‍, which allows you to automatically create Google Analytics events with your survey response data. In this post, we’re going to walk through the process of creating user segments with your survey data.

Google Analytics is a super powerful (free) web analytics tool. If you don’t have it setup on your Shopify store, I’d highly recommend doing so now. Instructions here.

How to Create Segments with Survey Data in Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to create Segments, which enable you to group and analyze cohorts of users or sessions. With Segments, you can analyze users’ behavior via an action, for example, viewing a specific page or in our case, submitting a survey response.

Create a Custom Segment

If you keep our default post-purchase survey question “Where did you hear about us?”, you can create a user segment based on a particular response, for example, “From a family member”. You can then use this segment to answer questions about this particular group of users. Are these users landing on your site via social? A Google search? Desktop? Mobile?

To do this, click “Add Segment”.

Next, click the red “New Segment” button and click “Conditions” on the left-hand column. In the first drop-down, we’re going to select “Event Category” exactly matches “Fairing”. Thereafter, click “And” and in the second dropdown, select “Event Label”, exactly matches, and type in the survey response you want to create a custom segment from, in this case, “From a family member”.

Analyzing Your Survey Data in Google Analytics

After you save your new custom segment, you can now use that grouping of users for analysis throughout your Google Analytics account.

For example, if we go to Acquisition → All Traffic → Source/Medium and select our new segment, we can view metrics about these users and the last site they visited prior to converting, their bounce rate, pages per session, etc.

Or look to see if your visitors convert faster based on how they discovered your brand, via the Path Length page located within Conversions → Multi-channel Funnels.

Example of Survey Data to Collect

You can also ask other survey questions that create more insight into who your customer is and learn how those groups of users are browsing your site.

How would you describe yourself?

For example, if you’re selling fitness products, you could ask “How would you describe yourself?” with answers:

• Fitness Professional
• Daily Gym Goer
• Occasional Gym Goer
• What’s a Gym!?

Then create custom cohorts and analyze how each group of users lands on your site and browses. Are the majority of your customers Fitness Professionals? Or do they rarely workout? This information can be extremely helpful in steering your future marketing decisions.

Asking your customers to classify themselves can help you test your core assumptions. In fact on a recent podcast our CEO told the story of a niche electronics brand did just that with a similar question, allowing customers to self-segment themselves as Students, Hobbyists, or Professionals.

Before asking their customers to self-segment they were operating under the belief that roughly 3/4 of their customers were professional users. After the results started to pour in they found out that Professionals only comprised 20% of their customer base.

This is the kind of insight that we’ve habitually seen from Fairing brands, and one of the reasons that we recommend asking “How would you describe/classify yourself?” as one of the first questions to ask during your 14-day free trial.