Google Analytics Segments: How to Set Them Up & Use Them
We love Google Analytics! Today we’re gonna talk about Google Analytics Segments, what a segment is & how to set one up.
So, a Google 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 purchased products as the result of seeing a particular ad, or came from a specific social media network. Bottom line, it’s a handy and powerful way to dig in, understand and act on all the great data that Google Analytics provides.
Next, how to set up a Google segment. Don’t be afraid, it’s really easy! Here we go.
Go into the Admin tab of your Analytics account. If you can’t find that, you really need some basic training!
Click on ‘segments’ in the ‘personal tools and assets’ section. You’ll arrive at this page:
You have a decision to make, either build your own, or choose from Google’s extensive gallery. The build option allows you to customize your own segment via a pretty simple method. Google has 7 categories of segments including Technology, Demographics, Behavior, & Traffic Sources. Once selected it populates with the relevant values for you to choose from, where Google sets the fields, and you select values from the list they provide:
For this example we’re going to add our own, versus perusing the Segment Gallery. We’ll save that for a future post. Here’s a segment we built in minutes, that we now use all the time:
And then when you simply ‘add segment’ in reporting, you’ll get an iPhone overlay in your reports:
And there ya go! We see the bounce rate is higher on iPhone than other devices, so maybe it’s time to take another look at our mobile optimization and content. Especially since if you notice the pie chart on the right, we’re driving a higher than average % of new visits from iPhone people, so we know the potential is there.
It’s easy to remove segments as well, or even add more. A natural next segment would be to add an Android segment to see the behavior of Android vs. iOS people.
In an upcoming post we’ll discuss some more uses of segments to help you understand, take action on and improve your results!
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