How Sessions are calculated when applying Advanced Segment - google-analytics

Suppose i have a product home page for eg http://domain.com/products/sonymobile.com and i need to find people who have visited the above product page in an session.
So when i apply an Advanced segment including page as above. The tricky part is how the sessions are calculated?
a) Does google count only the sessions wherein the session starts from "http://domain.com/products/sonymobile.com"
OR
b) the page can come anywhere in the whole session.
[Advanced Segment Image]

It depends on how you build your segment. If its scope is session, the answer is b). It seems that you are confused about an issue like https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2934985?hl=en , but it's not about segments.

Related

Google Analytics segment to exclude source not working, though reverse does

Trying to create a simple segment to excludes a referral source retrospectively (a spam site called trafficbot.link) from all analytics views.
I can:
…set Traffic Sources > Source > contains / starts with / exactly matches, and it will correctly show ONLY the spam/fake accesses (the percentage of users and sessions on the right is refreshed in real time).
I can't:
…do it the other way around, i.e. use does not contain / does not exactly match / is not one of.
The total stays stuck on 100% of sessions.
Am I missing something obvious?
I note this answer which has no input other than from the original questioner, suggesting Google say it's "not possible" to exclude existing requests - surely it is? Isn't that the whole point of segments? How are you supposed to filter out spam otherwise?
(I'm aware analytics filters isn't retrospective.)
You are talking about segments but the link you entered refers to filters.
Anyway, retroactively you can apply a segment to see the data without the spam one, you can use an advanced segment, choose conditions and exclude sessions that contain for example browser size equal to (not set).
https://www.fortop.it/journal/tieni-lontano-lo-spam-dai-dati-google-analytics/

Tracking events and making sense of it

Lets say I wish to track
User action - game he played - which area he stays - his house number.
If I were to track these event actions in Tabular format, it would look like:
UserId|Game|Area|House|Timestamp so on.
Then I can always run SQL queries if I want to answer few business queries. Like
1. In a given day/week, who is the most active User
2. Which game is most-played?
3. Which area plays most events
4. Which user from which area are the most active
Whats the best way to capture this using Google analytics? Will custom dimensions be useful. Or GA is not suitable for this kind of insight?
Thanks.
First of all, the house number is too precise, it would be against GA's ToS.
In GA everything is captured in "hits", you can think of this as one "row" of data.
Let's look at what you wanted to find out:
Most Active User? - This depends on how you determine "Active". Is it the longest Session durations? Tried most games? Most logins? Most sessions? To track a user, you'd need a User ID tracked.
Which game is played the most? - Again, what is played the most? Longest time in game? Most "start" games? This would require you to know the Game that was played and when someone started playing
Which area is most active? -This would go back to the definition of active, the region information is needed along with the active definition
Which users are most active in an area? Same as above, the user would need to be identified and area
To determine which Custom Dimensions (CDs) you want, let's look at the example data points you want to track and try to determine the scope and if it already exists as a standard dimension:
User ID - this is obviously related to the user, makes sense to be user-scoped
Game - This is a tougher CD. I would think that in a single session, users can play multiple games, thus I'd think you'd want this to be hit-scoped.
Area - GA already provides this based on the ISP
Timestamp - GA already provides time dimensions
From above, we can determine that you need to create two CDs, one to track User ID, the other to track the Game.
You can also look into using the userid feature in GA for cross-device tracking.

Can I filter a Google Analytics segment based on content grouping pageview count?

I want to create a Google Analytics segment for our users who view at least a certain number of pages on our site. From what I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong) this is easy to do if you don't care about what kind of page they view: you create a filter for the segment that checks to see if Unique Pageviews is greater than some value such as 4. However our site has a whole bunch of pages that I don't really care if someone reads (our "about page" for example). So what I'm trying to do is create a segment of how many people view at least X pages of what we call "Learning Content" (basically two specific page types on our site). How can I segment the users who read a certain amount of learning content?
Two types of pages fit into our definition of learning content. The first one has a URL matching a regex that sort of looks like /learning_content_1/.* and the second matches regex /learning_content_2/.*. I've already created a content group for learning content that correctly identifies these two content groups. However I wasn't able to find any way to filter a segment based on how many unique pageviews (or even just pageviews) come from a specific content grouping. Is this even possible? If not, how might I work around that?
The research I've done so far: Google Analytics: How to segment by many groups of pages was somewhat helpful but didn't address the question of how to create an actual GA segment based on pageview information for a content grouping or content group.
The only way I can think of handling this, is by associating a specific custom event that gets triggered on this page. Then you can create a segment that matches users who have that event category:
and total events greater than 4:
It's a workaround, and it doesn't work if you are tracking other events, but maybe that works for you?

How are dynamic segments in Google Analytics retroactive?

Are dynamic advanced segments retroactive at the session or visitor level? Can it retroactively recalculate session data or can it retroactively recalculate visitor data?
Here is an example as this is a foggy question.
Say I add an event tag to GA today. Tomorrow i run a report where the dynamic segment is for visitors who have triggered the event. The report requests unique visitors over time.
Now, if it is retroactive at the visitor level, the visitor is now tagged as having triggered the event. The report should show data going back in time (assuming these are not first time visitors). In this scenario GA will see if the visitors tagged arrived 2 days ago even though the events did not exist yet.
This answer no longer reflects up to date information.
Advanced Segments are not queried at the visitor level, and are thus not able to query data across sessions. They query particular sessions (or, visits), not visitors.
So, if you visit the site today, trigger an event, and then visit the site again tomorrow and don't trigger the event, an advanced segment for that event will be a query that says "Show me all sessions in which this event was trigger"; the former will be included and the latter excluded.
Similarly, if you do an advanced segment for a particular page, what you're saying is "Filter down to all the sessions in which this page was viewed" (this can be confusing for people who apply an advanced segment for a particular page, and the result contains more than just that page.)
However, they are dynamic and can be applied to the retroactively. In other words, the results of the advanced segmentation are not contingent on when the advanced segment itself was created. (This stands in contrasts to, say, account filters, that do not apply themselves retroactively.) They tend to be calculated on the fly; you'll notice that complex advanced segments can often take a long time to process, and tend to increase the likelihood that Google Analytics will return sampled (or, "fast access") data.
There is no way to use advanced segmentation to query across sessions.

Grouping visits by a number ID

I want to group visits by certain id number because every id represents a different client (think of a subdomain or something like that), for example:
http://site.com/234/home
http://site.com/234/search/something
are URL's for client 234, while...
http://site.com/155/home
http://site.com/155/search/something
are URL's for client 155.
I'm a total noob on this, thx!
Well one way permanent way to do this that that doesn't require you to change the tracking code in your markup is Advanced Segments.
Advantages of this technique in your case:
You can create each segment and given
them descriptive names (e.g., client
id);
Unlike, for instance, using an
Advanced Filter, the Advanced
Segments are active immediately (as
soon as you create them) and they
don't permanently alter your data.
Advanced Segments are simple to configure. This Post by the GA Team is an excellent step-by-step guide, or you can follow these two consecutive screen shots below:
Step 1: click Advanced Segments in the upper right-hand corner from the Dashboard view then click Create a new advanced segment when you see the view below:
There are a number of ways to configure your Advanced Segment; here i've chosen the Page Dimension from Content then selected Condition Contains then just key in a value for a path that distinguishes each client ID.
No exactly what you asked, but you can go to:
Content
Content Drilldown
See the aggregated unique pageviews and other info for each client /id/

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