Tracking Return Visits by Registered Users With Google Analytics

As a marketer, I am hungry to reach out and make contact with my site visitors. To understand what drives them. What do they like about the site? How do they use it?

Today´s challenge is setting up my GA tracking so that I can differentiate visits from people who are signed up to receive my newsletter from people who haven't. Sure, unique versus return visitors is a good wide approximation. but I want to know specifically the behaviour patterns of the people who have given me permission to reach out and communicate to them every morning with our newsletters.

I am thinking that I can do this by using the "user defined" visitor report. Basically, this report is designed to allow us to sort site visitors based on the content of their responses in a submitted form.

An example. Let's say you have a form in which site visitors can vote for their favorite Beetle. You have 4 custom segments defined by including the utm_setvar function in your website code - John,, Paul, George and Ringo. Now you can sort your visitors according to their preference in your GA reports.

To read on how to do this: you can check out the following forum posting at Nuhit.com. In this case, they are talking about segmenting visitors by vbulletin variables

I, of course, am not a programmer, so I´ll be passing the job into the capable hands of one of the programmers here on our team :)

In my case, I want to figure out whether I can set up two user defined segments....completed the form or didn't. I am thinking that what has to happen is that the form has to be, essentially, completed with a predefined "notsubscribed" segment....but then I need to figure out how to lump all of the other possible responses into a single category. I am going to talk to my programmers about whether we can set the segments as "contains @" or "does not contain @", because, hey...if there's no @, the form´s no good anyways, right?

I´ll let you know how it works out later in the day or week, depending.