Blog
Digital strategy

Segments in Google Analytics

This is part 2 of our series of articles on Google Analytics. This article will be about Segments in Google Analytics. Segment is a really exciting feature in Google Analytics that allows you to easily segment a portion of your visitors and only look at how they have acted on the website or compare one segment to another.

If you haven't read the first part of Contitude's series of articles on Google Analytics about Filters, you can find it here: Filters in Google Analytics

What is a segment in Google Analytics?

When you enter a view on Google Analytics, you will see all visitors to your website (except those you have already filtered out). You know you're seeing 100% of all visitors by this symbol :

It clearly states that you see 100% of all users. When you're on the home page in Google Analytics, you won't see this symbol, but it's 100% of all visitors that are reported even then.

A segment is a subset of your visitors and you can create a segment yourself that you want to analyse more closely. This can be particularly interesting if you want to track all visitors who have come in from a particular campaign or all visitors who have taken a particular action. Google Analytics also has features to segment by e.g. gender, age etc. if you have that feature set.

How do you add a segment?

To add a segment, click on the "Add segment" button at the top of Google Analytics.

You can then choose from many preset segments that Google Analytics has already preset. E.g. Organic traffic, Paid traffic, visits that lead to conversion etc.

All preset segments can be found under the menu on the left called System.

Create your own segment

In addition to using the predefined segments, you can create your own segments. To create your own segment, click on "New segment" in the segment menu.

There you can choose from a wide range of visitor details to create a unique segment that you want to analyse further.

Import segments from templates

If you want inspiration when creating your segment, you can also download segments from a gallery of templates created by other Google Analytics users. Then click on "Import from Gallery" and browse the available templates.

What will you use segments for?

Using segments can be very convenient when you want to analyse a specific target group. If you want to know which pages are most likely to be visited if the visitor comes from organic traffic, add the Organic Traffic segment. Then that traffic will be displayed separately. See the image below.

Leads to conversion

One of the absolute best segments that we at Contitude often use to analyze data is "Visits that lead to conversion". If you put that segment together with the "Visits that do NOT lead to conversion" segment, you can hopefully find what the differences are between the different segments. Sometimes it is possible to quickly see which pages visitors are on before they convert and which pages they never convert from. Then you can easily see what separates these pages and what makes the converters convert and vice versa.

Segment campaign

If you run many campaigns in different channels and are good at using UTM tracking, segmenting campaigns is a good way to segment.

It is a segment that you need to create yourself but it is relatively simple. You create the new segment and then click on traffic sources in the left menu (see image). Then you enter the same UTM parameters as you did in the campaign.

It is often interesting to see if the visitors have behaved differently through the campaign compared to your regular visitors and to try to analyse and draw conclusions about why they behave differently.

Just as it's good to be able to segment out those who have come in from a campaign, there's a case for excluding them from your data to compare over time. This can be done in the same way as above but with the difference that you specify "does not match exactly". This will give you a segment that is not affected by the campaign you have run.

Summary

Segment is a powerful tool in Google Analytics that is easy to use. It's a great way to analyze only a portion of your visitors or to compare certain groups of your visitors against other groups.

Being able to compare those who have converted versus those who haven't is one of the most exciting analyses you can do to optimise your website for more conversions.

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