It's one thing to see what the masses are doing on your site, the search terms they use, the pages they visit, the sales they generate. It's quite another thing to truly understand how targeted groups of visitors are behaving in your virtual outpost. The latter approach to analyzing Web metrics offers insights that open the doors to target marketing opportunities galore. The concept is called visitor segmentation: grouping visitors into segments according to specific actions you are trying to measure. You could segment visitors based on any number of factors, such as new versus returning visitors, paid versus organic search traffic, or converting versus non-converting users. The possibilities are virtually endless and the insights are absolutely valuable.
Source: BPM Today, http://www.bpm-today.com