Visitor Segments in Google Analytics

A few days ago, the Google Analytics team rolled out some fancy new features – one of which I found by accident today. I was playing around in my analytics account when my mouse happened upon the Advanced Segments dropdown.

I have been waiting for this little tool since I started my analytics account many years ago. This simple dropdown lets you easily specify a subset of data to use in your analytics reports. This means it’s now incredibly simple to see things like the loyalty of just your returning visitors (Google used to lump in first time visitors into this chart too, which made it close to worthless), comparisons between paid and unpaid traffic, or even compare what content new visitors are reading compared to your returning visitors.

You can even create your own custom segments and use those to filter your reports (youtube tutorial). This works just as you might imagine: beautifully.

This tool suddenly became exponentially more useful.