A common requirement in Google Analytics is to analyse the effectiveness of a campaign. One of the most powerful approaches to this is to create a segment for the campaign. This enables you to see all the reports and analyse the campaign by volume of traffic, behaviour of users once they get to the site, and conversions.
I am often asked by clients for a friendly step-by-step guide to creating such a segment. Since I had trouble finding one, here is mine:
- Find your campaign in the campaigns report – this makes sure there is traffic to analyse, and checks how the campaign name is coming through.
- Select Add segment at the top of the report
- Select the red + NEW SEGMENT button
- Give your new segment a clear name
- Select the Traffic Sources category on the left
- Set the filter to Campaign exactly matches your campaign name
- Choose if you want your segment to be a user based or session based segment:
- A user segment will include subsequent sessions from a user who clicked a campaign link, even if they come back via a different source. Therefore, a user segment will include assisted conversions in conversion reports. User segments are limited to a date range of 90 days.
- Session segments include only the sessions where the user clicked the campaign link. If the same users come back later, the later sessions are not included.
- Save the segment
You can now explore (nearly) all the reports in GA, narrowed to just the users (or sessions) in your segment.