How to Add Custom Segments in Google Analytics

Transcript: This is Rick Reinard, Manager of Web Analytics with Alight Analytics, and I am going to show you the “add segment” feature in Google Analytics.

As many of you probably know, you can add a segment to your data, which helps you slice it into smaller chunks when you’re trying to do analysis.

You start that by clicking the add segment button. Once you click this, the first thing you’ll notice is that Google has a bunch of system segments already built out for you. I’m going to show you how to build a new custom segment.

Start that by clicking on the red new segment button. And once you do that, the most flexible and powerful way to build your segment is to use the conditions feature down below.

I’m going to build out a segment today to look at how many people from the city of Kansas City visited our website. So, I’ll start by selecting city from the first dropdown list, and I will do contains Kansas City. As you’ll notice it starts to auto fill for me, so I can select that. In the past, to see what data I would have, I would have to click the preview button and look at the reports. What Google has added is a summary box to the right that shows me automatically that 7.79% of my users are from Kansas City. It also tells me that was 264 sessions.

What if I also want to say, ‘how many people are from Kansas City or from Overland Park, Kansas?’ Click on the or button, and select Overland Park in the box here. As you’ll notice, the instant I click out of that, it updates the summary on the right to let me know that 11.68% of my users are now included in this segment that I’ve built. I’m happy with my segment now, so I give it a nice name like “Users from KC and OP.” Click the save button, and that segment is now saved in my custom segments and is applied to the data I’m looking at.

That is Google’s new, updated Add a Segment feature.

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