What are some useful custom advanced segments for Google Analytics?

Hi!

Advanced Segments are one the most valuable tools in Google Analytics for someone looking to understand their business performance in a better manner. Using Advanced Segments is much like mining for gold. It allows isolating specific types of traffic in your reporting.

Check out this insightful blog by Tatvic. It talks about the following 7 must-have Advanced Segments from Google Analytics in greater detail so that you can decide which advanced segments you should be using.

1. Mobile Traffic (excluding tables)
2. Traffic Source with Conversion
3. Not Provided Segment
4. Keyword Length
5. Cart Abandoners by Traffic Source
6. Business Hours vs Off Hours
7. Depth of Visits

I hope my answer and the blog help you with picking your Google Analytics Advanced Segments. Let me know which ones you use or if there are any issues you are facing with it, I would be glad to help you out.

There are and could be many segments if you go deeper into Google analytics. It depends how minutely you want to explore the potential. So far as useful custom advanced segments are concerned, each of the major categories comprises useful segmentation possibility. For example, if you would want to explore organic data, some useful segments would be - long tail queries, question keywords, insight on not provided data (Which page do they actually visit and what they do) etc.

When it comes to social Media, the pick hour segments are very important.

When it comes to understanding leads, segments for users who perform internal site search, registration, login and eventually purchase are significant.

Creating segments is an easy task and you can create multiple. But planning segments for the key insights is very important. So try to focus on three categories i.e. organic, social and leads. You can find many custom segments in Analytics Solutions Gallery.

Recently I have also written an article regarding useful custom advanced analytics segments. It helps you understand how you can focus around certain topic at a time.

1. A 'Direct' traffic custom segment that includes traffic that hits the site direct but also includes Google traffic for people entering your brand keywords (otherwise natural SEO traffic is often massively overstated)
2. A custom segment that lists all of the blogs I comment on (blog commenting strategy)
3. A custom segment that lists a bunch of CSS directories for when we submit our new homepage design to CSS directories
4. A custom segment that lists all of the forums I'm active in.
5. A custom segment that lists all traffic from the major search engines, excludes paid traffic and includes any searches for brand keywords. This gives a more accurate reflection of traffic that is coming through natural long tail SEO / content marketing efforts.
6. I have one that lists the major tech blogs and I have a strategy for getting covered by these sites and I can measure howe effective that strategy is.
7. I also add any of my specific campaigns (email marketing, a Twitter campaign) into their own segments so I can compare them side by side with my other strategies (not all of which you can create campaigns for)

It depends on the nature and the profile of your business. For example, for my B2B oriented clients I always find it useful to create and then remarket with a specially written message a segment built up only from those who are coming from business related networks. You can find this information under Audience > Technology > Network. In some countries is very easy to differentiate between visits made from companies and visits made by ordinary people. For example, in Romania whoever uses ‘[provider] business’ is a company, while whoever uses ‘[provider] residential’ must be a particular. If i’m selling widgets only for companies than it is a good chance to push the remarketing efforts towards the companies.

• Unique Visitors by Page http://www.google.com/analytics/...
• Conversion by Time of Day http://www.google.com/analytics/...
• Customer Behavior http://www.google.com/analytics/...
• Top Converting Landing Pages http://www.google.com/analytics/...