Advanced segments and profile filters help you to segment your visitors and analyze and optimize your online business. Personally I like to use advanced segments first since I can apply them directly to existing/historical data. If I notice that I use a particular segment more often I might choose to use a separate profile connected to the profile filter instead or in addition.
In order to fully benefit from these powerful features it is important to understand the difference between them. Let me explain 6 differences that help you to get the most out of them.
1. Visit Level vs Pageview Level
Whenever you apply an advanced segment to your data, the report view is modified at the visit level. So you could segment all visits with transactions for instance:
Profile filters on the other hand modify the incoming data at the pageview level. If you haven’t read it yet, you should take a look at my 8 Useful Google Analytics Profile post.
2. Future vs Past
If you choose to use profile filters please be aware that they only affect future traffic. So you can’t apply the filter to your historical data. Did you already collect a large set of data and are you interested in distinguishing patterns or certain segments? Advanced segments may really come in handy since you can directly apply them to your historical data.
Just play with the standard segments and build a few custom ones to grow your experience. The default segments currently available are:
- All Visits
- New Visitors
- Returning Visitors
- Paid Search Traffic
- Non-Paid Search Traffic
- Search Traffic
- Direct Traffic
- Referral Traffic
- Visits with Conversions
- Visits with Transactions
- Mobile Traffic
- Tablet Traffic
- Non-bounce Visits
In my experience, Google Analytics is adding a few new ones now and then. For some more inspiration you should read this great post written by Anna Lewis: Top 15 Most Useful Advanced Segments in Google Analytics.
3. Aiming For The Long Run vs Short Run
Once you create new profiles with certain profile filters you ought to create them for longer-term usage instead of focusing on just one future analysis of this segment. If you are a web consultant working for different companies, I advise to discuss with your clients to come to your list of profiles. Same as you would do when deciding about which KPIs belong to a particular business.
Advanced segments bring you instaneous results. I like to use the ad hoc / on the fly analysis terminology here. You can easily use them for a one time analysis.
For example, you set a particular landing page for a yearly event. You would like to know how many visitors converted via this page and how many pages this group of visitors did see on average. In order to answer these and many more questions about the behaviour of this target group you can set an advanced segment on “Visits with Landing Page X”.
4. Conditional Segments vs “Static” Filters
Profile filters don’t let you make use of any conditional characters. Only static text string matches can be included. Advanced segments give you much more flexibility. You can incorporate text and conditional characters.
This level of flexibility applies both to the dimension as well as metrics side of advanced segments.
There is no limit to the level of flexibility in creating powerful advanced segments in Google Analytics.
5. Administrator vs Reporting User Roles
Any person who has access to a Google Analytics profile / account is able to create advanced segments in her account and no other person is able to delete the advanced segments a particular user creates.
Currently Google Analytics offers two levels of access: administrator and reporting.
Be aware that an administrator can create and delete Google Analytics profiles and accounts in just a few clicks. So carefully decide who to grant administrator access to when setting up a new Google Analytics account. I would advise to strictly limit the amount of administrators in any Google Analytics account.
6. Per User Basis vs Per Profile Basis
Segments can be shared with other reports and users which I see as an incredibly powerful feature. You can copy, share or delete any advanced segments that you created in the past.
Google Analytics profile filters are connected to a particular profile and it is easy to apply them to more than one profile from the Google Analytics account page.
Now it’s your turn to maximize the benefits of advanced segments and profile filters. This will lead to more conversions and higher conversion rates for sure!
Lots of good points highlighting the different uses of segments vs profiles.
With regard to point #6, I agree that being able to share segments with other users is a powerful feature, but there is a flipside: the share process is a bit cumbersome, involving sharing of links, and if you have segments you want to share with other users, you have to go through the sharing process for each new user to a given profile (or each existing user that doesn’t yet have the segment).
So this can sway the decision toward a separate profile with the appropriate filters that are then automatically applied for everyone who uses the profile.
Thanks for the article,
John
Hi John,
Thank you for your comment and I do agree with you. And I feel that the whole sharing process, this also counts for dashboards, should be a bit easier. There is still space to improve. ;-)
Best,
Paul