Use Advanced Segments To Get Quick‑and‑Dirty Visit Numbers

April 14, 2009

When I’m looking for insights about a website, I often have a laundry list of ideas of things that might be interesting, but only if they happen to pan out. There are lots of false starts and dead ends.

That’s why it’s nice to have a way to quickly get a rough notion about whether certain kinds of visits are significant. The “Test Segment” button that appears when you’re creating Advanced Segments can help you out here.

test-segment

You can try different criteria and use the Test Segment button to get the number of visits that match — all without actually creating the segments. Play around with the criteria until you get one that’s interesting, and then you’ll probably want to give the segment a meaningful name and save it. But you can cut down time creating a lot of advanced segments that turn out to be not so useful by playing with the Test Segment feature.