Although a free service, Google Analytics offers excellent reporting and traffic analysis that can help you assess how well (or badly!) your website is doing. One of the recently improved features is Advanced Segments which is in Beta Mode.  It enables you to easily segment your website traffic into meaningful segments. These segments can then be applied (individually or combined) to all the various reports.

How do you do this? On the right hand side of  any of your Google Analytics Reports pages (such as Dashboard) you will see the following image. You will notice that it defaults to All Visits. Thus, if you leave it unchanged, ALL traffic will be reported.

If you click on the All Visits tab, it will bring up all your current Advanced Segments. These are separated into two segments, firstly Default Segments (as shown on the left) and secondly Custom Segments, which will start off as blank. Just with the Default Segments you can perform useful analysis. For example, if you wish to analyse all your Paid Traffic only, you simply unclick All Visits and then click Paid Traffic.

From that point on, all reports that you view will be for Paid Traffic only. You can easily change the Segments to be reported at any time. You can also click on multiple segments, and the reporting will then be segmented. This enables you, for example, to compare your Paid Traffic to All Visits.

You can also Create a new advanced segment that will be saved for future reporting. Simply click on the link for this (its on the left side of Default Segments). The screen below will then appear. For example, if you wish to have a Segment for New York Visitors , here are the steps:

1. Click on Visitors on left. This will bring up all the Visitors tabs
2. Click on City and then drag it with your mouse to the dimension or metric area as shown below with the red arrow (drag and drop)
3. Condition will then appear. Click on Matches exactly
4. Value will show all the cities. Click on New York
5. Click on Test Segment. This will show you how many visits were received from New York during the reporting period.
6. Enter New York in the Name Segment box
7. Click on Save Segment. You are done! From now on, this segment will appear in your Custom Segments
8. You can easily manage and delete Custom Segments in future.

Below is a video that demonstrates the use of Google Analytics Advanced Segments. Please do not hesitate to contact us for help with your Google Adwords and Google Analytics accounts.