Google Analytics - How to choose between advanced segments and profiles ?

http://www.semetis.com - This tutorial aims at presenting the pro's and con's of advanced segments versus filters and profiles to observe a subset of your Google Analytics data. Advanced segments are interesting when you need to segment historical data, when you need to compare multiple segments, etc. The tutorial illustrates several of these situations and also explains why creating a few profiles is necessary in certain situations, for instance when you need to permanently affect the data or if you want to restrict user access.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• profiles
• advanced segment
• advanced segments
• analytics
• google
• google analytics
• web analytics
• filters
• user access
• kelly halfin
• howto

[Semetis]

Quizz - Can you share with us an advanced segment that you have created and that you find useful ?

[Semetis]

Thanks all for your constructive comments. Of course both are complimentary and the short video only lasts 1min46 when there are so many more things to talk about.

[juliencoquet]

While we're at it (and to rebound @MickeeMike) : profiles and filters are heavily page-view-based whereas segments are visit-based

Since you cannot cross the two without comparing apples and oranges, you cannot expect the same result from a profile and from a similar segment.

Also, and I fully understand this is meant as a short video, you should also explain that segments are complementary to profiles (provided of course that your historical data is collected properly from the start)

Cheers!

[MickeeMike]

Two major inconvenients to add for the segments:

1) they fail to output accurate data when there is too much data to analyze: for some reports, the estimations done by the google analytics system is far from the reality and aren't reliable. => To use with caution when data is extrapolated.

2) They are not applicable in the funnel reports, where for instance a segmentation by country is often useful

But I like both segments and profiles: they are very complimentary.

[juliencoquet]

@Semetis again: misleading if not using the API or data extraction ;-)

[juliencoquet]

Comparing 4 segments at a time is misleading since you at least use All Visits when comparing 2 segments or more.

So you're really comparing up to 3 segments with the All Visits segment.