Google Analytics Advanced Segments
Advanced segments in Google Analytics are one of the most powerful tools for gaining immense insight into your visitors. Not utilizing them is a HUGE mistake for any web site owner. For this reason I’ve spent the time creating, collecting and consolidating them to aid you in your Google Analytics mastery. If you have any I missed, please share them. I want to make this the best and most thorough source for Google Analytics advanced segments online. In order to use these advanced segments in your Google Analytics accounts, simply click on the links of the ones you would like below to add them to your accounts for your own use. Note that if you would like to add many or all of these advanced segments, you can save time using the batch installation method explained at the bottom of this post.
NOTE: This post was originally published December 26, 2012 with 34 advanced segments templates for Google Analytics. Since then a lot of things have changed. A lot of the original advanced segment templates became default Google Analytics segments. The ways some segments were setup became outdated and improvements in Google Analytics made others unnecessary. This post and the included advanced segment templates have been updated to reflect all these changes making them ready for 2017. I hope you find them useful!
Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Segments
If you’re taking advantage of Google’s AMP technology hopefully you’re doing it right and have installed Google Analytics to track activity on your AMP-enabled pages. If you are and you’re doing so in a standard way (adding “/amp/” to the end of your standard URLs to make them AMP-enabled) then these segments will allow you to compare AMP-enabled website activity to regular website activity.
Organic Traffic Segments
I used to provide different keyword length segments (1 word, 2 word, 3 word and longtails), but since (not provided) is now so prevalent there’s no need to break it up in this fashion. Just one segment that includes all organic keywords that aren’t (not provided) is adequate since there is so little to work with nowadays. Note that I have excluded keywords with “://” and common TLDs (.com, .org, .net, .edu and .gov) in them to avoid URLs from making their way onto this segment, since they are not keywords. So you’ll have to adjust the filter if your domain has an uncommon TLD. Sorry there are just too many to cover these days.
- Organic Traffic Keywords
- Organic Traffic Keywords w/ Conversions (A.K.A. “Money Keywords”)
Conversions by Visit Count
Josh Braaten recommends this segment because he finds it very useful for lead generation. It shows you how the number of visits impact your conversions and allows you to see different behavioral patterns leading to conversion.
Desktop / Tablet / Mobile Traffic Segments
Google Analytics comes with Mobile Traffic and Tablet Traffic segments built-in as defaults. For some odd reason they do not, by default provide Desktop Traffic segments. You can easily build these missing segments using the default Mobile & Tablet segments, which I have done for you below.
Branded & Non-Branded Keywords Segments
I have these setup, so they include “[your-brand-here]” in the filters. So you’ll need to replace this with your brand name. If your brand is multiple words, it usually make sense to setup multiple filters. This should encompass your core brand as well as brands related to your core brand. This can include projects, products, people, events, nicknames, etc. Essentially anything people may type in to find your web site specifically due to an association with your web site. Take a quick look through your Google Alerts keywords, as some of the keywords you’re tracking there may be relevant. Just scanning through your non-brand keywords will help you identify any of these you may have missed. I have them setup to exclude “://” and “.com” as well as “(not provided)” and “(not set)”, so your segments aren’t cluttered with non-keywords.
Social Media Traffic Segment
I’ve tried my best to capture as many major social media channels and common social URL shorteners as possible. Feel free to suggest more so we can make this more comprehensive. Currently the list includes: facebook, quora, twitter, linkedin, google plus, youtube, hacker news, reddit, imgur, tapiture, disqus, 9gag, tumblr, stumbleupon, delicious, technorati, digg, myspace, bit.ly, tinyurl, ow.ly, t.co, & tweetdeck.
Email Campaigns Segment
Email campaigns is another segment that should be included by default, but isn’t. If you have a mailing list this one should be important to you. Since your subscribers are usually your most valuable visitors, it’s important to see how they interact with your website.
Blog Traffic Segment
Your blog traffic is another segment that should be included by default, but isn’t. The one below assumes your blog is located at the following path: domain.com/blog/
Business Hours vs. Off Hours
Michael Freeman of ShoreTel created this custom segment to see what impact business hours 8 a.m. – 9 p.m. (ET) have on your web traffic.
User Behavior Segments
Generation Segments
If you have enabled demographics in Google Analytics you can segment some of your visitors by generation. While these aren’t perfect representations of each generation as Google Analytics is limited to general age ranges it is still quite interesting to segment your users in this fashion.
Goals & Events Segments
You should absolutely be tracking custom goals and events for all forms of conversion on your web site (desired actions you want your users to take on your site). Make sure you setup advanced segments for all of your custom goals and events as well, if you haven’t already.
Batch Install All Advanced Segments
Return The Favor
On a final note, think about how much time you just saved by having all these advanced segments ready to go for your use. Just imagine how much time that would have taken you to set all of those up from scratch!
Now please return the favor and put forth a small percentage of the time & effort you just saved, by sharing this link with your friends & colleagues via Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and wherever else you share this kind of content!
If you want to go the extra mile, please suggest a useful advanced segment that we should add to our collection here.
You should add another User Behavior Segment for “Explorers” or “Spelunkers” who visit more than 3 pages but are NOT returning visitors.
Explorers (visited more than 3 pages and are new visitors) added per your request =)
Can you explain, fans and explorers? You exclude pagedepth with 1,2,3.
Have you add pagedepth higher than 3?
And I don’t get your explorer segment. Why do You add sum of your visits=1. Shouldn’t you replace this with type visitor=new of returning visitor?
I’ve excluded page depth 1,2 & 3 to filter out visitors who browsed less than 3 pages in their most recent visit. This implies that these visitors we very engaged with the web site’s content. I’ve included all other page depths by only excluding page depths of 1, 2 & 3.
Visitor Type = New Visitor ultimately means the same thing. If you test it you’ll see that you’ll get the same results with either filter. I’ll adjust it anyway though, because your filter is less confusing =)
Andy: A big thank you for sharing, I just tried the long tail keywords template for my blog, but am soon gonna try most of these.
Note that your Google Image Search one will only show the oddly referral tagged Google Image Search traffic. Google has shifted over a large amount already into the google bucket in organic traffic so you would need more than a simple segment to get that information.
Oh, and if you’re lucky with the upcoming Universal Analytics, you can modify this further within the tracking info settings.
Do you know where to get all the information? When creating this I was comparing the results the segment generated to the custom report Annie Cushing made for this purpose that can be found here: http://www.annielytics.com/where-to-find-traffic-from-image-search-in-google-analytics/ and I was getting the same results.
Yes, but it requires the usage of profile filters unless you have Universal Analytics. I can place that here, but not sure if that’d be helpful since it’s not a segment filter?
It’s off topic relevant to this blog post, but I’d still like to see it!
Ah! it’s working again. Basically set an advanced filter where Field A is Referral with “imgres” and the output to is Campaign Source with “google image”. It’s quick and dirty, but it works well.
Thank you for your explanation. Have you thought about a segment, so you can distinguish rational and impulsive visitors?
This is great. Thanks for making it. Do you know of a way to add templates to all your GA profiles at once, rather than adding them one by one?
You’re welcome! If this is possible, I’m not aware of how to do it. That would be handy though, time to get on that Google Analytics team!
Nice post, very helpful – thanks Andy!
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this post, Andy! Great collection. Definitely worth of bookmarking and sharing. =)
Glad you dig it Angie! I appreciate that you appreciate the screen size segments, as those were the most difficult to get setup =P
I have some different groupings that I typically use, and I’m not great with regular expressions. When I’m back in the office I’ll try to send them over to you. =)
Sounds great! Thanks!
I think something is botched with your Android Smartphone traffic segment. Shouldn’t it just be include = Operating system contains Android / exclude = Tablet is Yes? Right now, it seems as though you’re telling it to include ALL traffic that is either ‘mobile (including tablet)’ OR Android OS, then filtering out tablets after. However, that still leaves all kinds of non-android OS traffic that came through in the ‘mobile (including tablet)’ filter.
Nice catch! Thanks for pointing this out, it has been fixed.
Great, thanks!
What a great post you have here! Thanks for all the info.
Cool! Thanks for the great help 🙂
thanks mate
I just added 7 additional advanced segments to the collection from this excellent post by Josh Braaten on Search Engine Watch: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2268458/16-Secret-Google-Analytics-Advanced-Segments-Worth-Their-Weight-in-Gold
I’ve started playing with eCommerce funnel segments as a way to identify abandonment issues. e.g.:
Added to Cart
Started Checkout
Reached Payment Page
Completed Purchase
Great weblog right here! Also your website loads upp fast!
What web hozt are you the use of? Can I get your associate link on your host?
I want my website loaded up as quickly as yours lol
This site is hosted by SiteGround – I’m a big fan. Happy to see wordpress.org finally got around to officially recommending them too!
What about users with activated adblock?
That’s an amazing idea! I’ll see if I can find a way to segment those users.
It took more than just an advanced segment to make it happen so I wrote a new post about how to segment users with activated adblock here: https://penguininitiatives.com/how-to-track-visitors-blocking-your-ads-in-wordpress/