You can use Segments to limit report results to data that match your specified criteria.

Choose your segments for your desired report by clicking on the pencil icon on your right menu. You will see a popup window, where you can search for existing segments or create new ones. Your selected segments will appear in the right pane. When you're ready, click Apply.

Segment selection behavior

When you click on the Segments section on the right and expand the dropdown list, you’ll see a number of the segments - some of them will be enabled and some of them disabled.

This is because segments are tied to a specific date range. The ones that are not available for the selected report date range are disabled (greyed-out). You will see a tooltip with relevant information on hover, as seen in this example:

To make the segment available, you need to change the date range.

The same behavior will occur for single date range reports, as well as for the Compare by date reports.

How to create segments to apply to standard reports

When you apply a segment to a standard report, you can set a date range for the segment – this is the range the segment is available to apply to a report. If the range selected on the report does not overlap with the segment date range, the report will default to the last date available for the segment. The segment date range must be selected when first applying the segment to the report, in this modal (note the "modify" option):

It is recommended that when selecting the date range for a segment, you set the start date far back enough that it covers your reporting needs and set no end date so it will be available when using it again in the future.

The segment will then take some time to process. Once it’s processed, you can immediately apply it to the report by clicking it in the segment dropdown:

Choose between segments and filters

Much of the power of Digital Analytics lies in its flexible segmentation and filtering capabilities.

What is the difference between a segment and a filter?

A filter narrows the report to just those rows that exactly match your criteria. A segment limits your report to just the sessions that match your criteria. For example, let us assume that 3 sessions occurred on your site today:

• Session 1 visited HOME, then SPORTS, then HOME, and exited
• Session 2 visited HOME, then BUSINESS, then SPORTS, then BUSINESS, and exited
• Session 3 visited HOME, then BUSINESS, and exited

The result of the above activity is contained in the following table:

If you apply a filter of "Page contains Sports", the report will update to only display the rows matching your criteria:

If you apply a segment of "Page contains Sports", the report will update to reflect all sessions matching your criteria and show results from session 1 and session 2 (but not session 3) as shown in the following table:

Use a filter to isolate your report set to your view of the world (for example, only articles written by Smith or only products of the Reebok brand). Every row in the result set will match your filter criteria.

Use a segment to:

• Perform relational analysis (for example, of those who arrive through our email campaigns and view 3 or more pages in their session, who complete which conversion events?)
• Understand visitor personas (for example, Engaged Visitors vs. Googlers vs. Sports enthusiasts)