Let's run with an example… Our site can be broken down into two major areas – our main site, selling our internet marketing services, and our internet marketing blog. Strategically two very different games. The idea of our site is to capture our income generating clients, whilst the aim of our blog is to capture industry specific long-tail keywords, hopefully a few incoming links, to convince a few people that we know what we're doing and to keep up-to-date. Organically these areas pull very different visitors, as you can imagine the main site pulls visitors with limited industry knowledge, maybe someone looking for "Google advertising" whilst a blog visitor could've been looking for something like "google adwords enhanced cpc beta". Easy to see the difference.
 Marketing Services |
 Marketing Blog |
Being able to separate the data for these two sections gives a much clearer understanding of exactly what's happening here. Take a look at the two images I've inserted in this blog. They both show basic pie charts of the visitor geographic location for our main site and our blog respectively. In both cases the blue area indicates our biggest market – South Africa. You can clearly see the difference in visitor location, as imagined our main site attracts mainly local traffic, whilst our blog showed a more international picture. This is just a small glimpse of the type of data you can work with, yet it neatly shows the importance of good data segregation.
For more details on how to set up these Google Analytics website profiles take a look in the analytics help section or read my Quick Guide to Setting up Google Analytics Website Profiles.
