So when you browse through the standard reports, checking your monthly visitor count or daily revenue, you only get about 9% of what Google Analytics has to offer .
The rest is hidden, just waiting to be discovered.
One of the best ways to explore the Google Analytics iceberg is through segments – both basic and advanced.
What are Google Analytics segments?
Google Analytics segments allow you to dive deeper into the collected data and gain valuable insights.
For example, you might be wondering how mobile visitors differ from desktop visitors. By creating a mobile segment and a desktop segment, spain email list you can review reports and compare the data side-by-side to identify behavioral changes.
Note:
- You can only apply four segments to a report at a time.
- AdWords cost data is not compatible with segments (shows as 0).
- You should use conversion segments for multi-channel funnel reporting.
user segments, session segments and hit segments
Before moving on, it is important to understand the different segment levels. There are three:
- Users: Actual people who visit your site.
- Session: Interactions on the page by a single person, grouped into what Google Analytics calls sessions.
- Hits: Interactions on the page during a session.
So a single person can generate multiple sessions, and each session can then have multiple hits.
Let’s say you want to isolate everyone who spent more than $300 on your site. User A might have spent $50 in one session and $250 in another session, how to track this metric and use it in your marketing strategies while user B might have spent $300 in just one session. A user segment would include both. A session segment would include only user B.
Do you see the difference?
Hit segments are of course at an even lower level, such as visiting a specific page or starting a video.
Note that user segments can only apply a maximum date range of 90 days for reports. If your date range is larger, china phone numbers it’s easy to miss the automatic switch to 90 days, so be extra careful here.
Simple segments
Simple segments include:
- Demographics: Segment your users based on demographic information.
- Technology: Segment your users’ sessions based on their web and mobile technologies.
- Behavior: Segment your users based on how often they visit your site and perform transactions.
- First session date: Segment your users (create cohorts) based on when they first visited.
- Traffic sources: Segment your users based on how they found you.
- Advanced e-commerce: Segment your users based on their shopping behavior.
Extended Segments
Among the simple segments there are the extended segments:
- Conditions: Segment your users and/or their sessions by single or multiple session conditions.
- Sequences: Segment your users and/or their sessions based on sequential conditions.
For example, if you want to understand how reading your store’s “About Us” page affects revenue per visitor, you could use conditions:
Sequences are particularly interesting for us in the e-commerce space. Let’s say you want to isolate people who abandoned their shopping cart:
You’ll find that there’s simply more flexibility and room for customization. Conditions and sequences require a deeper understanding to create than the simple segments.
Why are Google Analytics segments important?
When you open Google Analytics, you’ll see aggregated data from all your visitors. This is useful for a quick overview, but remember the proverbial iceberg. There are many insights hidden beneath the surface, beyond the aggregate.
As Avinash Kaushik famously said , “All data taken as a whole is crap.”
If you don’t drill down into your data with custom Google Analytics reports and segments, you’ll completely miss the 91%.
Also, if you’re using AdWords or Google Optimize for on-page experiments, you can really leverage segments. Once you isolate a segment, you can use it as the basis for an audience.
Let’s say you’ve isolated the cart abandoners from the example above. Now you can easily run an AdWords remarketing campaign offering them a discount on the items in their cart (or whatever you think makes sense for your audience).