Objective: Set up your account to analyze multiple countries.
Features used: Mappings, Segments, Goals & keys events, Dashboards
Time: 20 min.
Set up
1. Go to Mapping and check the URL of your site for the homepage of each country. Note whether it is either the host or path that changes.
- Here the host changes:
- www.shopstore.co.uk
- www.shopstore.fr
- Here the path changes:
- www.shopstore.com/gb/
- www.shopstore.com/fr/
Depending on what changes you can create a macro mapping grouping each country together, either by host or path.
Once you have this mapping you can duplicate it and then split each country as required—making sure to split only one country per mapping.
2. Create a goal for viewing the country you are interested in using your macro mapping.
- You can also create goals for viewing certain country pages (i.e. French homepage) if required.
3. Create country-specific segments, depending on how you want these to be defined.
- By Geolocation: users from a specific country based on IP address. It does not take URL into account, so it could include users located in one country looking at a web page for a different country
- By goal: allows you to create a segment of users who viewed certain country pages on your site, as defined in your mapping. This could include users from other countries looking at those pages. Remember, “French users” could include users in Spain looking at French pages.
Analysis overview
Once you have set up your mappings and segments, you can start analysing. There are two different methods for conducting your analysis:
- Option 1: If you want to analyze all users on different country sites, select the detailed country mapping.
- Option 2: If your site is not broken out by country, but you are interested in analyzing how customers from different countries behave, you could use the general mapping and apply country segments.
Remember to use a specific mapping when it comes to zoning, or change the preview URL, if the page is radically different for different countries.
Within the context bar you can combine two different segments using the “Add a segment” option. This will allow you to pair up your country segments with additional criteria, without having to create additional segments.
Step by step
It can be interesting to analyze different country behavior in the same way as you might consider different traffic sources or A/B tests. Work through each module using a general mapping, and apply country segments to see how they behave. With zoning, decide whether to zone the country-specific pages, or a general page. This can be especially useful if your website’s pages have different layouts/templates depending on the country.
Each feature can provide different insights about the performance of different countries, and whether there are cultural differences that may affect behavior.
1. Go to Site overview to analyze:
- Which country segment has the highest amount of traffic?
- Which segment is most likely to convert, or reach each step of the funnel?
- How does each segment behave on site (how many pages do they see, how long do they spend?).
2. Go to Journey Analysis to analyze:
- Do buyers navigate differently from non-buyers?
- Does the country the buyer is from have any impact on their journey?
- Is there any cross-country site navigation? Do different countries have different landing pages?
3. Go to Page Comparator to analyze:
- Which country’s site has the highest conversion rate?
- When looking at the same page across countries, which segment spends longest on the page?
- Do they interact more?
Here we can see that users are most likely to convert on the DE website
4. Go to Zoning Analysis to analyze:
- Is one country more inclined towards images whilst another prefers a lot of information?
- Does one segment interact with a CTA quicker than another?
- Does the layout of one country’s homepage lend itself towards quicker navigation than another?
5. Go to Dashboards and create widgets to monitor each country and use Alerts to quickly find out when there are notable changes in your KPIs.
Go further
When running this analysis, you should also check whether there are any country-specific campaigns running which could affect brand awareness, or target a specific product.
By working through this methodology you will be able to identify and target key pages for analysis, and work out whether the differences are based on differences between countries (and therefore can be ignored), or are due to the site itself (and therefore could be targeted for optimization).