Advanced Segmentation adds tremendous power to Google Analytics
Google Analytics’ new Advanced Segmentation features add a tremendous level of power and flexibility, opening up new ways to analyze website traffic. Now you can define your own group of visitors and see where they went, what they did, and what they bought.
Advanced Segmentation enables you to define “buckets” that your visitors fall into. For instance, you can create a segment that contains all visitors from AdWords’ content network advertising that visited a conversion page. You can then use this filter on virtually any of the standard reports to see how this segment or any other performs.
The intuitive user interface makes segment creation a breeze. You pick a “dimension” or “metric” and the associated values that you want it to have to define the segment. For example, you might pick the dimension “source” and set it equal to “google” to pick all visitors that come from the Google domain. (The tool even provides value suggestions based upon your existing data, very handy.) You can then additional conditions with AND or OR operators to create very richly defined segments. For instance, you could create a segment of all first-time visitors from Google that had the word “apple” in their search words and that have high speed Internet connections.
The one drawback with the current setup is that you can’t use Goals in your segment definitions, although advanced segments can provide the same functionality with even more flexibility. Segments can be used to replace goals entirely, and you’ll no longer be limited to only 4 goals.
Google Analytics also rolled out Custom Reports which we will discuss in a future post.
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October 29th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
UPDATE:
You CAN access goals by looking under Metrics / Goals. Goals still do have one significant advantage in that they allow the use of regular expressions while the advanced segments so far appear not to.