How To Create Custom Segments in Google Analytics

In the Google Analytics Segments 101 post we took a look at what segments are and how they can be useful for observing trends in traffic.  This is great if you’re using the stock segments that come with Google Analytics, but sometimes you want to create your own, custom segments in Google Analytics to track traffic.

For example, let’s say your site has a login and you are tracking that login via an Event in Google Analytics.  We can take that event and create a custom segment that shows just sessions that have the matching criteria, and then track our logins seperately from users who don’t login.  This can provide valuable insight, such as pages and content is important to our current customers (or those that do have a login Event).

Let’s get started!

Add A New Segment

First, let’s click “+ Add Segment” in our Analytics…

Then we will click “Add New” from the Segment menu.

Select Criteria

The next screen shows where you can select your criteria.  Here you can work with any combination of conditions including:

• Stock Dimensions and Metrics such as Bounce Rate, Channel, Referrals, Campaigns, or others
• What to filter against, such as Sessions or Users
• Include or Exclude the matching data in your segment
• Stacking of conditions with the AND or OR operator

Let’s add in our “Login” as an Event Category, and set it to Include, and use Sessions

Set Your Visibility

An often overlooked portion of Segments is setting the visibility (probably because it’s hidden in the upper-right corner).  By default, any segment you create will be visible across all of your Analytics accounts.  You can restrict visibility here to just this view if you wish.

Segment Summary

Analytics will also show you a summary of the matching traffic for this segment.

Name Your New Segment

Finally, you’ll want to give your segment a descriptive name so that you can save and re-use it later (you can create and destroy segments at-will and without penalty).

Apply And Analyze

With our segment added, we can compare it to other segments, such as the default “All Sessions”.  In our example, we can see that our “Login” segment has a lower Avg. Time on Page, lower Bounce Rate, and a lower % Exit for the homepage – all great info.

Summary

Creating segments gives you tremendous insights into your Analytics – much more than just an overview.  They are different from filters, and allow you to view traffic for a particular set of users.  Hopefully you’ve learned how to create custom segments in Google Analytics, and can apply this to your own site.

What segments do you find useful?  Let me know in the comments below!