Did you know Advanced Segments could be used on historic data?
In this post I will show you an example that you might found very useful.
A little bit of background
If you were using Google Analytics utmSetVar() to set a user defined variable in order to segment your traffic and also were working with profiles and applying filters the chances are you experienced some of the following situations on your reports (Look from October 2007 till the day you switched to the new Google Analytics tracking code ga.js).
- Unexplainable increase in visits and consequent effect on some other metrics
In this report visits increase between a 10% to 15% on October 2nd and keep that way without a logical explanation.
- Visits with less than one page view
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For this profile we had a significant amount of visit with less than 1 page view. Clearly a sign that something was not right.
- More visits than page views. At this time I don’t have any report to show this case but if you go to the unofficial Google Analytics Support Group on Google Groups and search for “more visits than page views” you’ll find users that have experienced this.
The motivation
Since I had some customers that had experienced this issue for several months. When Advanced Segments were announced I started thinking on how to use this feature to obtain a historic visits trend for 2007-2008 without the presence of the over counted visits that I decided to call ghost visits, that was the easiest name to explain management that those were not real visits (Spooky, I know…).
The solution, in 2 easy steps
- I created a very simple Advanced Segment, which I named without ghost visits. The condition is quite straightforward, include visits with Page Depth Greater than or equal to 1, this will exclude all visits with less than 1 page view.
- I applied the Advanced Segment to Reports and enjoyed my reprocessed data!
This figure shows the corrected visits per week graph.
In this case the corrected Average Page views per visit. (It seems there is a small bug in the GUI, for this case the graph doesn’t show the weeks.
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And finally the modified depth of visit report.
As you can see, the Advanced Segments feature gives you a great opportunity to look back into your data in a different way. I’m sure you can think of more scenarios where this look-into-the past and segment your data ability can be really useful.
Hi Andres,
I find your post very useful, showing an interesting way to use the advanced segmentation. However, as far as I know these “ghost visits” as you call them are mostly associated with the use of utmSetVar().
Have you noticed a sudden increase in visits or unique visitors when this feature is not used? May be something related to upgrading the tracking code or mixing ga.js and urchin.js code?
It happens that I came with a case with such a pattern. I applied your filter and does not show any difference. I would really appreciate any feedback.
Thanks!
Jose
Jose
11 Dec 08 at 5:09 pm
Hi Jose,
Yes, the problem I described on the post is related to using utmSetVar().
If you are having a sudden increase in visits and unique visitors and you’re not using setVar at all, I will probably blame it on the utma cookie and something going wrong during a visitor’s session.
Probable causes:
Are you using trackPageview() and urchintracker() on the same page?
Does your site spans multiple domains/subdomains? Are you setting setDomainName() correctly?
Diagnosis:
Navigate your site, record the value of the utma cookie on each page view, after navigating through a page tagged with both codes or when moving from one domain/subdomain to another. Look at the unique_id on the utma cookie (It is the value after the first dot), Does it change during the session? It shouldnt!
Cheers,
Andres
Andrés
14 Dec 08 at 8:54 pm
Hi Andres,
I find your solution very usefull, thanks.
What about the unique visitors? This metric doesn’t work when you use advanced segmentation.
I wonder if there’s a way o really filter out set vars for a given profile.
Eduardo
1 Sep 09 at 11:58 pm
Hi Eduardo,
Currently the only way to create a segment and be able to get Unique Visitors is to create a separate profile (not an advanced segment).
To create a profile to track or exclude a particular value of setvar you should use a filter on the user defined field.
Let’s hope Google surprises us in October at the Washington summit with new announces like the last years.
Andrés Flores
2 Sep 09 at 12:44 am
Quizás sepas si en Urchin existe esta posibilidad, la que pregunta Eduardo para segmentar los usuarios unicos.
Bueno quisiera saber si Urchin tiene esta funcionalidad habilitada también para los “usuarios únicos absolutos” a diferencia de Google Analytics, y si no me gustaría saber porque no está habilitada para los usuarios únicos absolutos.
gary
12 Nov 09 at 8:19 pm
Hi Gary,
I think you have to separate questions.
1) Regarding Urchin, as far as I know currently it does not support anything similar to Advanced Segments (but I might be wrong about this). The interesting thing about Urchin with respect to this post subject (get new insights on historic data) is the fact that with Urchin you have always been able to reprocess historic data, as long as you store the logs files.
2) Unique Visitors. Well actually Google did surprise everybody again at Emetrics Washington and one of the features announcements was about Unique Visitors. Now if you have a custom report with the metric Unique Visitor you’ll get the Unique Visitors for the dimensions you are using, furthermore this report will also work if you apply a custom segment.
cheers,
Andrés
Andrés Flores
13 Nov 09 at 10:33 am