I caught Matthew Bailey's presentation for "Analytics: Data into Action" at SES NY this week, and it's true: he is a fantastic, animated speaker. I can see why he's a favorite at so many of these shows.

Matt's session started with basic but good points (a) that analysis is more than reporting, (b) that web analytics works best when you start with clearly defined expectations about what you're going to measure, and (c) that no analytics solution is 100% accurate, but that trends are far more important than accuracy. All good stuff.

But then he delivered a hallelujah moment: great web analytics is about understanding the segmentation of your audience.

He exclaimed with great vigor: "Find the different goals and motivations of your visitors -- they're not one big herd of cattle moving from point A to point B!"

He also emphasized that "there is not a single conversion rate, but different conversion rates for different segments. Segment your analysis as well as your visitors."

I wanted to jump up and shout, "Yeah!"

Having been banging on the segmentation drum for many years ourselves -- occasionally feeling like the lone little drummer boy -- it was wonderful to have such a respected voice in the web marketing space advocate this ideal so clearly and passionately.

However, while Matt primarily focused on using different search marketing keywords as the way to segment respondents -- which is certainly a good idea on its own, matching different landing experiences for your different traffic sources -- we believe that pre-click segmentation is only trickle from the faucet compared to the waterfall of insight that can be harnessed from post-click segmentation. Transparent, participatory segmentation choices that respondents make along path-based landing experiences enable a much broader range of segmentation tracking and analysis.

I hope this segmentation meme comes up more and more in the shows and seminars ahead for 2008. As we've seen with our customers again and again, it is key to moving the bar in conversion rates.

-- Scott Brinker