Google Analytics Advanced Segments 101

Creating monthly SEO reports for clients can be a tedious process and at times can become a total data catastrophe – datastrophe for short.  Wouldn’t it be nice to simplify things by flexing your ability to isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic at will?  After recently completing the training courses offered by Google’s Conversion University I’m happy to share a few key takeaways I’ve picked up.

Introducing Google Analytics Advanced Segments 101 – For those interested in isolating traffic subsets to include visits that meet a specific set of criteria.  GA’s Advanced Segments feature allows users to quickly dissect traffic from a certain geographic region, or visits that resulted in purchases of a specific dollar amount.

Before moving forward, it’s important to distinguish the differences between Advanced Segments and filtered profiles.  Advanced Segments can be applied to historical data and are always available across all accounts and profiles while filtered profiles permanently restrict and modify the profile data going forward and are only useful for a specific web property.  Advanced Segments can be compared adjacently – up to four at a time – in reports and are generally easier to produce than filtered profiles, which can only be accessed one at a time.  So you want to consider using a filtered profile when permanently restricting or modifying the profile data, which is especially useful if you need to restrict user access to a subset of data.

Click Advanced Segments and select your desired segments.

Now you should see the data with the desired segments throughout all of your reports.  Another nice thing about Advanced Segments is that they remain active until you turn them off our log out.

You can change the date range to view the specified segments in historical reports, take last year for example.

To better understand your company’s biggest spenders we must first identify them.  So lets create an advanced segment that singles out visitors who made purchases of $35 or more in a single visit.  Your biggest spenders’ price tag depends on the average price of products sold.

Click Advanced Segments and head over to Custom Segments. Click + New Custom Segment.

On the next screen you want to specify the metric Revenue, indicating purchases greater than $35.

To find the metric Revenue you may type “Revenue” into the dropdown box or manually click through to find it with the rest of the metrics and dimensions.  Select Greater Than and enter 35 in the corresponding field. Feel free to add other relevant conditions to the segment to further dissect your traffic.  Name your new custom segment “$35 Purchases” and click preview to see the percentage of visits from the new segment.  If your happy with your new custom segment simply click Save Segment below the More Options tab.

Now your new $35 Purchases segment will be accessible in the Advanced Segments pulldown for every account.