I love using Advanced Segments in Google Analytics. Sure, you can export a big chunk of data to Excel and then use some Excel wizardry to clean up the data and display it in different ways, but what if you just need to get a quick snapshot of certain traffic or trends, but the default segments don't go far enough? I've put together a few of my favorite Google Analytics Advanced Segments for you, so that you can add them to your own Analytics and use them as you need.
Segment 1: 1 word keywords
This first segment will just give you all of the one-word keywords that are driving traffic to your site. Sometimes there are crap keywords, but I am increasingly finding it interesting how sites can rank for one-word keywords because of personalized results.
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){0}\s*$
Segment 2: 2-3 words
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$
Segment 3: 4+ words
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){3,}\s*$
Segment 4: Social Media Traffic
Sometimes you need to see the easy breakdown of your referral sources, and even more often it can be helpful to see just your Social Media traffic. Here is how we have our Social Media Advanced Segment set up in the Distilled Analytics account:
Segment 5: Traffic to Blog (where URL is https://www.site.com/blog)
If you have a separate blog where you write and try to generate both links and traffic, it can be helpful to have a way to easily segment out the traffic to just this section of your site. Sure, you could just use the Filter section, but why do this when you can set up an Advanced Segment and have it forever? A little more work in the short term can save some big headaches. Note: this is really only helpful if your blog articles have the URL structure of https://www.site.com/blog/(post-url) Here is how I have set up an Advanced Segment to do just this:
Segment 6: Google as Source
Since SEOs often care mostly about Google traffic (for better or for worse), since it is where the bulk of our traffic comes from in almost every case, I also have an Advanced Segment set up to show me the traffic where Google is my source. Here you go:
Segment 7: Twitter Traffic
Here is the Advanced Segment I use. Have I missed any?
How to set up Advanced Segments for any section of your site.
Here is how I set up an Advanced Segment for my SEO category:
Finishing Up
These are the most useful Google Analytics Advanced Segments that I have in my arsenal that can apply over almost any client. Others have written about more specific Advanced Segments in these posts:
I suggest you read those as well. Please add in your favorites (especially ones involving RegEx) in the comments!
Great blog post! If anyone isn't a big Analytics fan, here's a nice formula for segmenting brand v. non-brand in Excel.
Export all organic search terms. Note that you will have to add an &limit=30000 in the URL for Google Analytics to allow a large export.
Once all the keywords are in Excel, use the following formula:
=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("beginning of brand keyword",A2)),"Brand", "Acquisition")
For example, if the brand is Walgreens, we would use something like "Walg" to capture any misspellings. Isn't perfect by any means, but works alright.
Then I filter from z --> a in that column. Go down to where acquisition starts and insert a row above. Do a new formula starting in acquisition with your next brand phrase. Filter and then continue this process until you've gone through all brand phrases.
Then select the brand v. acquisition, visits, revenue, and any other desired columns. Create a pivot table and you can see what drove all of those metrics (whether brand or acquisition).
A good alternative for those who hate custom reports in Analytics or are using another analytics platform.
Great Post John,
Here are some Advanced Segmentation for the Local peeps where you segment traffic coming from Google Places, Yelp, Merchantcircle and others
Cheers
Oooh good stuff. We need more Local information on here, so this is super helpful!
+1 for your Great Suggestions!
Nice one! Maybe a stupid Q, but how exactly would you insert the regular expressions as in the first 3 segments?
Keep it up!
Choose your Keyword and set the condition "matches regular expression". Then write or paste your expression in there
S
Thanks! :) I had already add all of advanced segments. It's really wonderful
p.s. sorry my bad english. (I'm from Russia :) )
Don't need to excuse yourself... and don't fear to comment :)
Well then you're doing a good job! Do you have others you use that could be helpful?
John
Great post man! One segment I'd like to add is "New non-brand search visits" - see pic:
https://screencast.com/t/8AbwNQchg89
Great to be able to see how much new traffic coming to the site from general, non-branded searches, and compare segement against other types of traffic.
-Dan
Dan - Good call on this! I didn't include this one because normally when I'm working with large brands, they get a lot of organic traffic with misspellings of keywords, so it is very hard to segment out with Advanced Segments. Yours is phenomenal for small businesses though.
Thanks for providing it!
Thanks John, I hear you, as I'm sure you can relate, I've seen sometimes 100+ different versions of a brand search, with all sorts of mispellings I didn't know were possible :-)
I think it may be possible to do with RegEx, something I want to look into now!
I got it done using RegEx. Time consuming to set up, but has proven to be quite useful for analyzing the success of our SEO efforts. By no means an expert at RegEx, so there's probably a better way to do it, but I was able to get close by using a formula like this:
brandedkeyword1|brandedkeyword2|brandedkeyword3|brandedkeywordmissspelled|
etc...
after going through the keyword report a few times I ended up with a RegEx that was pretty long, but no trouble putting it back into the advanced segement and now I've got quick access to a keyword report that excludes branded searches.
Dan that segment really seems great and as John said it can really proves ethical while working with small business.
Thanks!
This is terrific. I would just add that for t.co twitter links to make it a regex
^t.co
to prevent the segment from including URLs like xxxxnet.com, xxxxdot.com , xxxxcoat.com, etc
One more thing... regex ^t.co$ ... my knowledge is that source does not block of referral paths so you are safe to use the 'end of string character', the money sign :)
This is a great post John, now with the first three segments, you can clearly see patterns of your visitors via head and long tail phrases side by side (turning on all three segments at the same time). Using that, you can probably see clearly whether particular groupings convert greater than the other.
First and formost! This is a AWESOME post. I can "show off" some cool things today to my boss/clients. I remember reading some stuff on filters in google analytics by Danny Sullivan. I don't know if I got it working correctly but I will check today. Do you have any cool tricks with filters too? Like knowing where in the search you was?
Here is one of them I was reading: https://yoast.com/track-seo-rankings-and-sitelinks-with-google-analytics-ii/ and I cannot seem to find Dannys.
Very handy post John,
thanks for curating all these advanced segments and share them.
Oh thanks for this post, will try implementing the segments this week.
GA is one of those FREE tools which contain a lot of depth and if you are creative enough, it got so many hidden things for you to explore… I really like the idea of separating one word and two+ words keywords in Google Analytics… other than that I am already using advance segments to monitor traffic from different social media channels and specific part of the blog.
Usually working with big websites it is a very good practice to break down in to sections and track the traffic of different sections separately and this will allow you to figure out why traffic graph take an unusual move (can be positive or negative)… and what section of the website is exactly affected.
Thanks for the comment! I totally agree and think that breaking down the site into sections can really help you figure out where the traffic is going. On large sites, it's also useful to know if a section of the site is driving good traffic, and if it is not, you can work towards diagnosing the issue (is it too broad? Is there not enough search volume?) and fixing it.
Another great post John. Here is a simple filter (not segment) I use to grab long-tail keywords.
^[^ ]+( [^ ]+){3,8}$
Filter your Organic Traffic with this and it will give you keywords between 4 and 7 words long. Feel free to edit the numbers to find what you're looking for.
hi, thanks for this article. it so great ;)
But (Segment 5: Traffic to Blog), if I have a subdomain blog.site.com, exist some way to display it like landing page (not like host)??
thanks! ;)
Thanks for linking out to my post. Advanced segements can be made really powerful by using them with regex on filtered custom reports. When we talk about advanced segments we certainly can't miss 'Avinash'. Can we? So here is the link to his awesome post on 3 advanced segments.
Thanks Himanshu for sharing such a great article from Avinash itself. Really today is great day for me to do analytics practice thanks to you and John.
Great post! I especially like the first few segments, great way to segment out broad or long tail keyword visits.
Those are the winners! That's why they went first :-)
I've set up a segment that excludes certain words or phrases. It filters out the kinds of words and phrases that aren't relevant to converting. It's very useful. It allows me to get a more real idea of things like bounce rate etc...I call it the Money Keywords segment.
Do you do this to include certain words, or just to exclude certain terms you know do not convert? How did you decide which terms to include or which terms to exclude?
Where should i enter - ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){0}\s*$ in GA to find one-word keywords driving traffic to the site ?
Thanks for the post!
In the new version of Google Analytics easiest is to go to your Traffic Sources > Search > Organic and then on top of the page Advanced Segments and then add a Custom Segment with Keyword matches the Regular Expression e.g. ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){0}\s*$
Hope this helps.
Another useful one I sometimes use is to exclude "Brand" Keywords - Same thing as above just use Exclude > Keyword > Containing > "Brand"
Thanks for the post - interesting. Another tip is using the Excellent Analytics Plugin for Excel. This plugin gives you all the data you need to slice and dice as far and as much as you want. It's fast and flexible, and I've found that it enables you to forage easily into deeper insights that one might find challenging with GA. Add to that, the ability to add Pivot tables from the data you have easily compiled, then the world's your oyster!
Nice post John, I was nit aware that we can know the rate of traffic coming from social media thanks for the post
I have never used segments for filtering data. I will use it. Thanks for sharing.
Great topic! useful and insightful! This is a great topic to cover. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks a lot for the clear and concise insights here. Our company is going to be featured on one of the highest rated shows on cable tonight, a show that gets between 1 million and 1.5 million viewers every time it airs. I just got our Advanced Segments set up for the landing page people will hit when they see the show. Feeling much better now about tracking referrals specifically from social. Appreciate your efforts on this, very timely for our brand.
Great comments and suggestions! I really enjoyed reading this and my analytics are pumped up. Thanks again!
bit.ly is not necessary twitter source, or am I missing something? Otherwise, excellent post!
Yesterday I found a great tutorial obout using regular expressions written by Lunametrics. You can find it here:
https://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2006/08/13/regular-expressions-part-i-escaping-with-a-backslash/
I use the pipe | A LOT in Google Analytics to do ad hoc "OR" analysis. Makes my life so much easier :-)
I use a lot of advanced segments for one of my websites and it helps me a lot to understand the data much better.
Very useful article. Thanks for all the great segments information.
Also in the last update Google Analytic has now online demographic status.
Excellent post, thanks! Question: is there way to tweak the reg ex for number of words in a keyword for filtering On-Site Search? I applied the same reg ex to Behavior > Search Term in Advanced Segments and while it definitely appeared to filter something, the report still including tons of keywords outside the range of the expression.
Kinda late to the game on this post, but here is a regular expression I use to get content ideas. It leverages Anthony Nelson posted above and helps surface "question queries" in Google Analytics.
^(who|what|where|when|why|which)\s[^ ]+( [^ ]+){4,10}$
Of course, the length of the queries can be altered to fit your needs by altering the {4,10}. Have fun.
John,
These are great advanced segments you've provided here. You inspired me to create a bunch more. I hope you find my additions useful. I added many useful mobile segments including some more basics combined with responsive design resolution segments, I added some additional filtering to the keyword segments to leave out the non-keywords, expanded on the social media channels included and added a "Fans" segment for when users visited more than 3 pages and are simultaneously returning visitors.
You can find my additions here: https://penguininitiatives.com/comprehensive-google-analytics-advanced-segments-template-collection/
I just wanna say that John after reading your post, I really like and love now the 7 Google analytics advanced segments. I am also pleased by your tips on how to set up advanced segments for any section of a site.
When you add a new custom segment, the changes get incorporated across all the profiles listed in your GA account. How can I add them to profile specific?
For those having trouble with the segment 5 /blog traffic,
try changing "Landing Page" to "Page"Worked for me.
Just used your 3 words plus segment to analyse a customers site who came to us suspecting that they have been hit by the Panda update. Very useful.
Thanks for the great blog post. Do you know what I need to put in to log the landing page's exact url? I put in the full https://huddersfieldwebsitedesigner.co.uk and chose matches exactly, but it is not tracking that. I cannot choose contains because all urls on my site will contain that.
It's for the purposes of tracking a/b testing. The landing page is either default homepage or https://huddersfieldwebsitedesigner.co.uk/home-b so I want to create segments to view each visitors behaviour.
Thanks.
Mmm. The "Segment 5: Traffic to Blog" is not well defined. Consider that segmentation change data at visit level. So in the "traffic to blog" segment you will see all the visit data from who visit blog AND the site, not only who visit the blog.
Great post and i like it . This topic is vital for me and i get benefit form this information and use in my practical life . This blog is beneficial for more people . Thanks for sharining nice information.
Thanks for this, the one word, two - three word and four word plus are excellent, put them in me list!
love the first 3 segement formulas, i tried my Chinese projects, it seems working well for English keywords coz they have space among. But in Chinese language people normally don't search kw with spaces, therefore only chinese kws with at least three spaces will be showed up.. But still it's a good way to know, thank you!
Great Post! Everyone should use custom segments and RegEx, which is simplest and fastest way to substract complex segments from large data sets.
Also i've one point about your 5th segment. It will work only if there are no other bages with /blog (by the way on forums, like /forums/blog-fnjsn-......) ti avoid this issue better use "begins with" filter.
I've got same problems few month ago with local sites like www.site.com/de etc.
Awesome Post showing the advanced options of GA. I'm truely insterested in the social media source tracking and the suggwstions @wissam3384 made for tracking "local" sources! thank you both!
Nice post! I've always meant to get around to adding some of the mentioned segments in my own analytics account but... I've increasingly found ways to put it off. Seems like a good reminder to get on the stick, eh?
Regarding the blog traffic segment, we had a fun time for a while of trying to get the filters just right so that they actually show just blog traffic.
Some folks, especially if they're running ppc campaigns or affiliate programs, may find it useful to filter out landing pages tagged with the ppc and cpc mediums and affiliate query strings, if they find that some incoming visits are actually going to other parts of their site. Unless you're directing ppc campaigns and affiliate links to your blog, I suppose.
Another great way of using Advanced Segments. If you're tagging your campaigns (and you should), this is easy in Analytics.
Google analytic is handy tool always which help you to gathe the exact data which is useful to your site....Thanks for share this segments..
Inspite of it that i use google analytics on daily bases to check my traffic but i don't use advance segments, perhaps am afraid that if i lose some setting but now after read your post i feel that i should be aware deeply about my traffic that from where am getting traffic and where should i focus more then other activities.
Wonderful post dohertyjf, Google Analytics is best for separate out the various Sources, Behavior and Outcomes. Advance segments are truly great for measure user behavior and lead for online success as well.
Segment 5 which i like the most because i have my blog and URL structure is same as you said so it is like a gift for me. Recently i have added my blog so i love to start this segment by today. Normally i used all of the segments you mention and specially i used segments for the bounce rate. Where i put the source,keyword,landing page and time so it is to easy measure the outcome data.It is vital to know the end user behavior and where we lack. So i analyze the every page and if they need some surgery then i do it timely manner. Very useful article about web analytics Segmentation is recently shared by Avinash and he is shared some really great stuff.
Lastly great thanks to you for this refreshing updates.
Great post John. Bookmarked for inevitable use later :) - especially the 1, 2-3 and 4+ keyword regular expressions, those are great and always a headache (for me at least) to get my head around.
I am applying the more thourough research on google analytics and your given segments are one of the favorits of mine..thanks for sharing them with us!!!
Thank you for posting this! I had just asked on Quora 2 days ago how to segment social media traffic and wheather I should be using advanced segments. Perfect timing! I'd also like to segment the blogoshphere which gets a bit tricky. I have set it up for the following: blog, wordpress, tumblr, posterous, tumblr
I know there are so many and that some blogs have random URLs so I can't track all of them. Are there any suggestions for top priorities when trying to filter out people who are blogging about you and bringing traffic to your site?
Thanks!
Should twitter really be its own segment of social media tracking? I like the comment above about non branded keywords but only from a unique visit. Also, Local search is something that I want to investigate further.
Its true GA is a great tool! Liked the techniques of keyword specific data retrieval. I am using Google Analytics from long and exploited Google Filter and Segment at great extent. The flexibility of advancement in GA for Ranking checking, exclusion of some IP specific traffic and segmentation for filtering goal data are the few manual enhancement that I consistently use.
I never heard this one. I think tomorrow is my busy day.. Got to learn this one. Thank you mate.
@dohertyjf - Thank you for a lovely refresher on how useful Advanced Segments are. We often forget the basics and it's when we come back to them that we evolve in different directions. I have a bit of a different question though, when it comes to all these fantastic Advanced Segments, most of us don't remember them in our heads, where do you store your list of goodies? Do you have an application like Text Expander for snippets?
This is great, but what about a segment measuring mobile traffic? I'd assume with sites that have apps this could be useful and since about 30% of site traffic at least in my case is mobile it might be good for sites who are selling ads to have a measure of the mobile traffic as well. Just a thought though.
New Advanced Segment -> Include -> Mobile -> Exactly Matching -> Yes
That should do the trick!
This was a great read. As a SEO Specialist for my company, it gave me an insist to more analytic tools for me to try out.
Many thanks for the tips, will use on some of my clients sites.
My take on resources such as Google Analytics continuing to be free, is that SEO's should ensure some of their clients and / or their own sites, invest some money each month on Google Adwords as well.
I agree with you what you have described in your post. Thanks for an elaborative way of describing it all.
Love the 1-word keyword list! I've been learning some RegEx recently but I'm still completely baffled by the logic underlying this statement, except that perhaps 0 refers to the number of spaces:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){0}\s*$
Similarly, Anthony Nelson's comment suggests using the following for 4-7 keyword phrases:
^[^ ]+( [^ ]+){3,8}$
So I replaced the {3,8} with {0} and I got the same thing as result #1 but it looks a lot cleaner:
^[^ ]+( [^ ]+){0}$
Since \s is an escape for the whitespace character, is there an advantage to using one or the other or does it come down to preference? (the first example being less ambiguous about what the string is exactly and the second example being shorter and easier to type?
Thanks for the pointer on tracking twitter. I knew my numbers looked skewed. I completely skipped bit.ly and hootsuite.
John Doherty really fantastic article mate. It is very compulsory to have grip on Google Analytics specially working for the big sites and advanced segmentation is such powerful concept which make our job lot easier while analysing traffic behaviour or while making any other strategies.
I don't know why many peoples criticised the GA performance but I just want to say all the persons who have disbelief in Google Analytics that advance segmentation is a facility which Google introduces in 2008 and it was like a rocket science for industry and the biggest advantage is that we can use it totally free. Still many paid tools are not allowing you to segmentation of all your data without changing a javascript script tags every time you need to segment something , or not without paying extra additional facilities.
Sorry John for being irrelevant, And thanks for this ethical article.
I would talk about Google Analytics being for free... yes, we don't pay "nothing" to Google, but all the anonimous data it receives via GA is better than money for Google, as those data feeds so many others tools they have.
But surely this is not the place where to discuss this topic :D
yeah! This is the era of information and information can actually pay 3x and more then the stright paid software income.
It's also important to think about how GA being free factors into Google's current revenue model. AdWords makes up the vast majority of Google's income. If you can optomize your site so that it's more profitable, you'll have more money to spend on AdWords. Obviously not everyone is using adwords, but the two (and GWO as well of course) go hand-in-hand.
If the service is free you are not the customer, you are the product.