I was thinking the other day about some of the problems with Advanced Segments in Google Analytics. Don’t get me wrong, I like the feature quite a bit and use it all the time. The main problem I have is that advanced segments require an extra step.
What I mean is that when you view a profile’s report, if you want to apply an Advanced Segment, you have to expand the drop down or click the link in the left nav, click a few more things, and then finally it’s applied.
That’s OK if you need that advanced segment infrequently. But what if you have an Advanced Segment you use constantly, all the time, maybe even every time you view a particular profile? Then this process becomes a bit of a hassle.
Enter Default Applied Advanced Segments.
This new feature gives you the ability to set a particular advanced segment or segments as the default segment that will be applied to the profile every time you go to view that profile. Once you’re viewing the profile, you would still have the ability to remove that advanced segment or apply a different advanced segment altogether as usual. What this feature does that’s nice is offer a “recommended view” of the profile.
Currently, Default Applied Advanced Segments are both login based and browser based. Custom Advanced Segments are already login based, so that’s no big deal. But if you access Google Analytics from multiple machines on a frequent basis, you might be frustrated if you have to set up your Default Applied Advanced Segments on each machine.
Eventually I would like to overcome this limitation, but this is a bit beyond what I’ve done so far, so it will likely be a while before I can come out with the update. I would also like to create a version of this that is managed at the admin level. That way, any admin will be able to set up which advanced segments are applied to the profile by default, and can change this for other users.
You can get in on the action by:
Of course, if you already have Firefox or Greasemonkey, you can bypass the appropriate step(s).
I would also like to get some feedback as to how useful this feature is so far. This blog post is intentionally devoid of details on how to use this feature. I’m hoping that this feature will be both obvious and discoverable. So let me know what works, what doesn’t, or what else you might like to see, and I’ll see what I can do.
