Along with custom reports (and sometiimes in conjunction with them), custom advanced segments are a great way of gaining extra insight and value from your Google Analytics account. In this post, I’ll round up ten very useful custom segments that you can import straight into your GA account, and save yourself the trouble of creating them yourself. Please suggest any other segments you find useful in the comments…

Just click on the link and, if signed in to Google Analytics, you’ll be prompted to add the segment to your account.

Not provided segment for organic search

This is a major pain for marketers, and this segment allows you to quantify exactly how much of a pain it is. Then you can bitch about it with the facts at your fingertips…

See? Almost 25% of all visits are ‘not provided’:

It gets worse when you view this as a percentage of organic search traffic. Then it’s almost 65% of all organic queries, essentially rendering measurement of keywords almost useless, in our case at least.

Organic searches minus not provided

This one filters out all the pesky not provided searches so you can concentrate on analysing the keyword referral data you have.

Google+ traffic

Who knows? There might actually be some.

In our case, not an awful lot, as this segment shows. The spike, if you’re interested, was down to the Google+ discussion around this GA custom reports round-up.

This does show that, if you provide something of value to the G+ audience, and get involved in the discussion, it can produce results.

Search queries with multiple keywords

This one comes from the fantastic Avinash Kaushik, and you’ll see a more in-depth explanation on his blog. You’ll see how much time you’ll save with this if you read how Avinash created it.

Basically, it’s a great way of measuring long-tail traffic, and shows visits with three or more keywords in the search term.

For Econsultancy over the past month, this segment shows that 22,183 visits used three or more keywords, 19,967 used four or more, 12,454 five or more, and so on.

Branded vs non-branded keywords

Of course, branded keywords are unique to your business, so you’ll need to create this one yourselves. Here’s how…

Click on ‘+new segment’ and select ‘exclude’ from the first drop-down. After this, choose ‘dimension’ and select ‘keyword’.

Then it’s a case of adding your brand keywords to exclude from the non-branded report. If you have more than one, select ‘add AND statement’ and repeat the process for other brand terms.

For the branded keywords, it’s a similar process, only you need to include the keywords you excluded in the non-brand segment.

Mobile traffic (excluding tablets)

Google Analytics has a pre-loaded advanced segment for mobile traffic, but this includes tablet traffic. Since mobile and tablet can be very different, it makes sense to look at each individually.

Organic traffic with conversions

The next couple of segments will help you to see where converting traffic is coming from.

This one shows organic search traffic which converts:

Social traffic with conversions

This is the same as above, only for traffic from social networks.

Here’s what it looks like, you can add any social sites which are missing, or remove to show the conversions from one particular network.

Blog to website traffic

Wany to find out how much traffic your blog is sending to the rest of your site?

This segment shows unique visits where vistors have entered through a blog page and ended up elsewhere on the site. This one only measures unique visitors, but you can edit to add pageviews and other metrics.

Depth of visits

This segment shows the number of visitors viewing three or more pages on your site. (I found this one on Boagworld but I can’t find the exact article).

This is a good way to look at the depth of engagement, and how effective you are at keeping people on the site.

For example, we try to provide blog visitors with ideas for further reading, through promotion of reports, and related articles, and effective internal linking.

It’s a good idea to use this segement to compare time periods so you can see how effective your efforts are.

In our case, happily, we’ve managed to increase the number of visits with three or more pages.

Depth of visits for social traffic

This is a version of the report above, which will show you if social traffic is more or less engaged than the average.

Here’s what it looks like. You can play around with this and use different traffic sources, page depths or see which of the social networks send the most ‘enagaged’ traffic.

Related posts:

What have I missed? Which custom segments do you use regularly? Please let us know below…