It’s hard to believe, but it has been nine moths since Google launched their Advanced Segment feature within Google Analytics. To me, this was the feature that finally propelled Google Analytics into a real competitor with for-pay analytics services. Until that fateful day in November 2008, I was a huge advocate of ClickTracks because it was reasonably priced, offered log-based and JavaScript tag-based data collection, and most importantly, allowed for great segmentation of the actions on the site.
For those not familiar with segmentation, in web analytics, this generally refers to the process of looking at a slice of your web traffic based on some filter. You might want to only want to look at visitors from one country, or only look at visitors that visit during a certain time of day or filtering by a cookie that you set on the visitors browser. Segmentation is one of the biggest evolutions in analytics in the last five years. (I’ll write more about this in my “back to basics” series in a few weeks.)
One of the drawbacks of the segments that you can create in Google Analytics is that all segments are associated to a username/login. There are two problems there 1) I can’t easily share them with others and 2) if I write a custom segment for one profile, it shows up on other profiles where it is not relevant.
I don’t have a good way to address my first issue, but I wanted to share my workaround for the second. Because DigiKnow provides analytics support to a large number of our clients, we have access to many domains and profiles. To avoid confusion about which segments go with which which profiles, I keep them organized by generic segments (like ‘Mobile’ or ‘DigiKnow Internal’ in the screen shot above) and profile specific segments (like ‘Traffic from OH schools’ or ‘PSC traffic’). If the segments are client or profile specific, I add initials in front of the (BNB, VBB, DK) to indicate which profile it goes with. I know it seems simple, but when you have more than 10 segments, you forget which one does what.
If you aren’t using segments, regardless of your analytics package, think about it. If you need some guidance, please email me and I will be happy to help.
