When I was starting out in business I was not too impressed with marketing people. It seemed to me that all they did was repeat back any idea that I had and add segmentation to it. But with modern web traffic analysis, segmentation has truly come into its own and marketing has become a whole lot more rigorous and empirical. We would like to identify common characteristics shared by visitors with high conversion to revenue rates, and even better with high recurring revenue and lifetime value. We know that the average lifetime value for a customer is a bit of an oversimplification. There are many different types of customers. Some, are not only high recurring revenue, but are very satisfied with our offering and tell others how much they like us. Then there are one time customers who buy once, and we quite possibly lose money attracting them. And there are customers we'd just rather not have who complain constantly and demand refunds on everything they buy from us. When we segment our customers into groups and identify common characteristics, so we can figure out what kind of visitors later become our best customers and focus on attracting more like them, we're engaged in a fairly sophisticated form of segmentation. Here are some types of metrics we can use to segment our customers and potential customers. Where did a visitor to our website come from? Sponsored search, they click on an ad that we ourselves placed on a search engine. Organic search, they clicked on an unpaid link to our website that came up in search results, or they clicked on a link that we placed in a group email or in a tweet. They came to us from a third party website. Someone like a food critic wrote a blog post or article about us and included a link to our site. Or direct they typed in our URL themselves. We can also find out what kind of devices our visitors are using. Are they on mobile iOS or Android? Are they on a Mac or Windows machine? And what browser are they using? And we can determine where in the world they are. Often the country and state and region IP addresses provide a significant level of geographic information down to the zip code level in the US. Are they a new or returning visitor? If returning, are they already registered with us as a customer? What did they do when they got to our site? Did they bounce, which means leave immediately from our landing page? What was the total duration of their visit? How many of our site's webpages did they visit? And more advanced tools track each exact path through our website what is called the click stream. So here is an example of something we might discover doing this type of analysis. People who click through an organic link, have a much lower bounce rate, say 25% than the people who find us through a sponsored link, 45%. In this case, it would make sense to devote resources to improving our organic ranking in search results, a process called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Some basic SEO steps we could take are to make sure that our content is current, substantive and directly relevant, avoid diluting our landing page results with unrelated topics or unrelated vocabulary. Try to get third-party web sites that have authoritative reputations for substantive opinion, like quality journalistic and product review sites and blogs, to mention us and provide a link to our web site. Increase our social signal by increasing our Facebook page likes, retweets, and building a substantive Google Plus page and increasing likes for it as well. Having a large number of followers and even more important, retweets by influential people on Twitter also counts towards one's Google ranking. All of these things improve organic search placement. Let's imagine that our web metrics tell us that a large number of our very best recurring revenue customers come from Norway. If you think about it, this would make sense. Norway is quite a wealthy country so the demographic there could afford luxury goods. And it's a very rural country where people tend to live far away from towns and cities, and so their people would not have local access to a pizza restaurant. So, we might decide when we realize this that we ought to target ad words in Norwegian. So for example, [FOREIGN], or [FOREIGN]. You get the idea.