Using Segments as Dimensions in Analysis Workspace

Hey, everybody, this is Doug. In this video I want to show you how to use segments as dimensions in analysis workspace. And so even though segments are segments and dimensions are dimensions, I know, newsflash, segments can be used very much like dimensions in some cases. And that’s kind of the tip that I want to show you today. So as you would normally take a segment, let’s say this 11 to 20 days, and you can see that if I click on this little info bubble here, it is, you know, hits where days since last visit is greater than 10 and less than 21. So, when is the last time they came to your site is between 11 and 20 days. And so, I can take that and I can drop it of course, up here in the segment area. And that will, of course affect all, I’ll just drop it, all of my different visualizations and tables, et cetera, right? It affects everything. And usually that’s how you would use segments, I suppose. And you would have in the rows here of any given table, you know, different dimensions, whether that’s a product dimension, different products, different pages, these are the things that you would get from up here in the dimensions area. And so what am I talking about with segments as dimensions? Well, one of the things you can do, and I’ve brought in this empty table here, is you can actually put those segments into the table, just like you would dimensions. And so, for example, if I take that 11 through 20 days and just drag it and drop it in the main table here, then it treats it like a dimension, but instead of saying, you know, product or a page or whatever, it’ll say segments. Now let’s do a couple others. So if I say show all, I can grab a few other segments that were built the same way. So here’s my one to five days. I’ll add that by dropping it right here on top of segments, not to break it down by this one, but rather just to add it and you can see my little hint over there and that’s great. And I’ll do the same thing to add six to 10.

So I’ve got one to five, six to 10, 11 to 20, and maybe I’ll just add that 21 to 50 and I’ll drop that in there as well. And then we can kind of, you know, finish up the table the way that we want to show it. Maybe I want to sort that by those segments. So I’m going to` click on that so it just, you know, does that in order one to five, six to 10, et cetera. Maybe I’m going to grab something like page views. So I’ll just grab page views and drag that in here, instead of occurrence, I’ll replace that. And then maybe I even change this timeframe just to the last, you know, 60 days or something. Since I have that there, I can grab that and the last 60 days, apply it. And if you’re thinking that my numbers are kind of weird here, don’t forget that I actually applied that segment to the entire panel. And so the only reason why it has all my numbers in 11 through 20 is because yeah, 11 through 20 is here. So it’s limiting it to that, so let me get rid of that one. And then I have numbers for all those different time periods there. Now let me just add a couple more metrics into this table just to make a point. So I’m going to add visitors, so I’ll just type in visitors, unique visitors right there. And I’m going to put it right here and I’m going to add that one. I’m also going to put in revenue.

So, revenue’s coming in and I’ll put it after that.

Now, the reason why I did this is to show you that I have visitors up here and I wrote that, so I could have written unique visitors, same, same, page views, page views, revenue, revenue.

So, why would I do one of these or the other, in other words, should I just put a segment up here and look at these numbers, or should I put a segment into a table and add these numbers here in my columns? So beyond just saying, you know, whatever you want and however you want to look at the data, I will give you a couple of tips and that is first of all, if you want to, and these might be obvious, but if you want to look at a lot of different visualizations, if I scroll down, I have all these different tables and I’ve got different visualizations, I’ve got a fallout report and a donut and another table. If I have want to put one segment and apply it to all of these different visualizations, then I’m going to do it in the regular segment area here. I could also drop those segments in there as a dropdown. So let me show one more thing, of course, it’s kind of going beyond the scope of this, but let’s just say, I’ll just grab some that I have here available and I can grab all of those and I can bring them up here and press shift and create a dropdown and so now, and I could have done that for these four here as well. And just so you could go through them one at a time, you know, and select them one at a time, or even stack them and do these kinds of things here. But if I wanted to do you know, this kind of a thing, then that’s great. But if I just want to, let me get rid of those, that’s going to drive me crazy, of course. so I’m going to take a bunch of time here and get rid of those guys. But if you want to be able to have a quick glance at a few segments, multiple segments, and kind of just see how they compare to each other with some metrics here in my columns, then this is actually a really good way to do it. Treat them like a dimension, put them into a table like this and just take a look at these different numbers. Now, another way that we can treat a segment like a dimension, if I scroll down here to my products table, and I’m just going to grab, in fact, I better, not all five, but just grab one of these, visits from mobile devices. And in a lot of cases you would break down, you know, some dimensions by other dimensions. I might break down, you know, product by marketing channel or something like that, but I can also do that with a segment. So, if I grab this visits from mobile devices and bring it in here and say, “Well, what about this leather tote?” And I can break it down by that. Then it’ll show me the regular one and then also broken down by mobile devices. And it’s really kind of filtered by this segment. But again, it’s a breakdown. You’re breaking it down by this and you could break it down by multiple segments if you want. But that’s another way that you’re kind of treating this segment like a dimension. Now, going back up to this table that we built here of these segments as dimensions, I will also mention that you might be wondering, you know, when would I do it this way to compare these segments versus using a segment comparison panel, which is right here. And that way I can, you know, bring this over and compare segments as well. Well the difference is, in this case here with this table, I’m really doing some basic comparison of as many segments as I want, you can see here, of course, that I could drop any number of segments in there. But I’m really just kind of, you know, popping some metrics in here and taking a quick look at those. The segment comparison, which we’ll go deeper to in a different video will give you deep comparison between two segments. So if you have a couple of segments, you want to do a real deep comparison on, use this segment comparison panel. However, again, just to do a quick comparison of several segments, treat them like a dimension, pop them in a table and there you go, have a great day. -