We just got back from IMC Vancouver 2009 with the opening keynote given by Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist and author of “Web Analytics: An hour A Day” (He is donating all the proceeds from the book sales to Doctors without Borders)

During Avinash’s keynote speech he took a slightly different approach and focused on making analytics “sexy”. I must say it worked out pretty well, especially after a couple of hilarious stories about his quest for sexy jeans online and A/B testing for pop-up adds of half naked girls for American Eagle Clothing!

But seriously folks. The two main points to take home from his keynote at IMC were the importance of segmentation and analytics. In his presentation Avinash tried to show what makes these two metrics appealing to online businesses.

Segmentation

Avinash shared with the audience a few tips for how to easily segment your data, and explained why segmenting is an excellent strategy for gaining insights into your visitors behavior online.

He stressed the importance of not just looking at the aggregated data, but segmenting out your data and going deeper into the statistics to get a rich understanding of your visitors’ wants, needs, and motivations.

He used the Visitors Recency Report as example, a report that shows the frequency of visits to your site. The more people that visit your site, the more valuable they are to your company as this behavior most likely indicates customer loyalty. Without segmentation you would never have identified this subgroup within your traffic.

Analytics

Avinash also touched on how when it comes to analytics people get caught up on unique visitors and number of page views but usually look past the bounce rate and tracking conversions. According to him, this is a big mistake.

In Avinash’s own words, “Bounce rate means: “I came. I puked. I left”, and at the same time it is “the sexiest web metric ever”. Bounce rate measures the quality of traffic you are acquiring and it helps you understand where and how your site is failing your visitor.”

Furthermore, he pointed out that online marketers often get overly excited once they make a sale, when what they should be doing is staying cool and tracking the conversion. This is the the next step in understanding what was the cost of making that particular sale.

That means in order to succeed you have to set conversion goals and not be afraid to set more than one conversion goal at a time. It involves setting multiple goals for both micro- and macro- conversions.

For example, even though your macro-conversion goal is to make a sale, your micro-conversion goal can be the number of subscriber for your newsletter/rrs feed or number of clicks on your coupon.

He wrapped up his keynote by emphasizing how data does not provide you with a competitive advantage, rather it’s your effort and imagination with the data that is what is going to set you apart from the rest.