segments

Introduction

A segment is a subset of your Analytics data. For example, of your entire set of users, one segment might be users from a particular country or city. Another segment might be users who purchase a particular line of products or who visit a specific part of your site.

Segments let you isolate and analyze those subsets of data so you can examine and respond to the component trends in your business. For example, if you find that users from a particular geographic region are no longer purchasing a line of products in the same volume as they normally have, you can see whether a competing business is offering the same types of products at lower prices. If that turned out to be the case, you could respond by offering a loyalty discount to those users that undercuts your competitor's prices.

You can also use segments as the basis for audiences. For example, you might create a segment of users who visit your menswear pages, and then target just those users (your audience) with a remarketing campaign that is focused on the new items that you are adding to those pages.

Segment types

A segment is made up of one or more non-destructive filters (filters that do not alter the underlying data). Those filters isolate subsets of users, sessions, and hits:

Subsets of users: for example, users who have previously purchased; users who added items to their shopping carts, but didn’t complete a purchase Subsets of sessions: for example, all sessions originating from Campaign A; all sessions during which a purchase occurred Subsets of hits: for example, all hits in which revenue was greater than $10 You can include filters for users, sessions, and hits in the same segment.

The Analytics user model illustrates how segments map to the Analytics data hierarchy:

Users: People interact with your property (e.g., your website or app) Sessions: Interactions by a single user are grouped into sessions. Hits: Interactions during a session are referred to as hits. Hits include interactions like pageviews, events, and transactions.

Using segments

When you apply a segment and navigate through your reports, the segment remains active until you remove it. You can apply up to four segments at a time, and compare the separate data side by side in your reports.

In addition to analyzing data with segments, you can use them to build audiences.

Analytics includes predefined segments (System Segments) that you can use as provided, or that you can copy and edit to create new custom segments. You can also build your own segments from scratch. In addition, you can import segments from the Analytics Solutions Gallery, a free marketplace where Analytics users share segments and other solutions they’ve developed.

Key Terms

Goal

Goals are used to track desired actions on your website. For example, subscribing to your email newsletter, submitting an inquiry or registering as a member. Goals can be configured inside Google Analytics and can be based on people traveling to a particular page (or pages), triggering an event, sessions of a certain duration or viewing a certain number of pages.

Content Grouping

Content Grouping is not retroactive You can configure content groups to classify each page of your website into a particular category. This allows you to perform top-level reporting and analysis on your pages based on your own content classifications. You can create content groups by modifying your tracking code, by extracting details from your pages or by creating rules.

Custom Segment

Apart from the default (or system) segments, you can also create custom segments to filter the data that is (or is not) included in your reports. Segments can be configured to focus on particular sections of your traffic based on users and sessions. For example, you can create a custom segment to perform more detailed analysis on your top-performing customers to understand how they’re engaging with your website.

Filter

Filters can be applied to reporting views inside Google Analytics to include a subset of data (for example, only include data for particular parts of the website) or exclude a subset of data (for example, excluding your own sessions on the website) or to transform the data (for example, to modify the reported page path to include the hostname).

Attributions

The process of assigning credit for sales and conversions to touchpoints in those conversion paths. Essentially, you're quantifying a contribution a particular channel made on your sales or conversions.

Attribution Model

Rule or set of rules that determines how credit for sales and conversions are assigned to each touchpoint in a user's journey. There are different types of models, say, last click attribution, or first click attribution. Last click attribution would assign 100% credit to the final touchpoint before a user purchase. Say a user went to Google, looked for your site, found a blog, clicked on the blog, read another article and then clicked on a link to your site. There were many steps in that path and with last click attribution, 100% of the credit goes to that final click. First click attribution assigns 100% of the credit to the touchpoint that started that conversion path. So that search to Google would get all of the credit when they click onto your site.

Conversion

This is a completed activity online or offline that is important to the success of your business. You might measure a conversion when someone signs up for your email newsletter, which would be a goal conversion, or makes a purchase on your site, say an eCommerce conversion.

Dimension

A descriptive attribute or characteristic of data. Default dimension examples are:

• Browser
• Landing page
• campaign
• exit page
• session
• screens
• geographic location(city, state)

Event

An action this is tracked when a user interacts wit content

Goal

Used to track discrete action and their value. example: visiting 5 pages on your site, purchasing >$5 worth of products

Pageview

When a page is laoded, or reloaded, in the browser. Pageviews is a metric defined as the total number of pages viewed. One unique user can contribute multiple pageviews.

Segment

This is basically a subset of sessions, or users, that share common attributes. You might segment your data by geographic region to see what parts of the country or the world are improving your performance. Drilling down to look at segments of your data helps you understand what causes a change to all of that aggregate data.

Session

A period of time a user is active on your site. By default, if a user is active for 30min or more, any future activity is attributed to a new session, menaing they'll be flagged as a repeat visitor. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes are counted as part of the original session.

Content Grouping

content grouping

Content Grouping lets you group content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site or app, and then view and compare aggregated metrics by group name in addition to being able to drill down to the individual URL, page title, or screen name. For example, you can see the aggregated number of pageviews for all pages in a group like Men/Shirts, and then drill in to see each URL or page title.

You start by creating a Content Group, a collection of content. For example, on an ecommerce site that sells clothing, you might create groups for Men, Women, and Children. Then, within each group, you might create content like Shirts, Pants, Outerwear. This would let you compare aggregated statistics for each type of clothing within a group (e.g., Men’s Shirts vs Men’s Pants vs. Men’s Outerwear). It would also let you drill in to each group to see how individual Shirts pages compare to one another, for example, Men/Shirts/T-shirts/index.html vs Men/Shirts/DressShirts/index.html.

If you want to compare aggregated sales by Department, then you might create a group called Department, and within that group create content for Men, Women, Children.

You can create up to five Content Groupings. Within each of those, there is no limit to the number of Content Groups you can define.

You have three options for how you assign content:

• Group by Tracking Code (modify the tracking code on each web page): Add a single line of code that identifies the content index number and the Content Group to which that content belongs.

• Group Using Extraction (extract content based on URL or page title) Use a regular expression to identify a full or partial URL, page title, or screen name.

• Group Using Rule Definitions: Use the rules editor to create simple rules to identify content.

You can use one, two, or all three of these methods. If you use more than one method, Analytics adds content to a group based on the first match. Analytics first evaluates the tracking code, then whether you have defined any regular expressions, and then whether you have configured any rules. Within rules, Analytics evaluates the rules in order.

You can include the same content in multiple groups.

Content Grouping is not retroactive. The Content Groups that you create are valid only from the creation date forward. You create Content Groupings at the view level, under Admin > > Content Grouping.

About 24 hours after you create a Content Group, you can see that data in your reports.

###Content-Grouping statistics in your reports

Content-Grouping statistics are available in the Content reports that offer Content Grouping as a primary dimension.

You can also use Content Group as a dimension in custom reports.

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