Fairly recently, some obvious changes occurred to the advanced segment creation screens, such as the “starter” conditions that are now broken out separately in the interface.
A less obvious but more profound change is the “scope” selection. We now have the option of selecting Users as the scope of our advanced segment and thereby identifying a certain behavior as characterizing not only a single visit, but all visits completed by a user.
For instance, you can define an advanced segment at User scope based on completion of a specific event, such as viewing a video, and apply that advanced segment to your Conversion reports to see if viewing the video at any visit during the visitor lifecycle affects goal conversion rates.
Similarly, you can now define a Page segment at User scope. In this way, you see how viewing a certain page during one visit may affect other behaviors and metrics in other visits by the same visitor.
Keep in mind that cookie deletion breaks the continuity of the User segments, since a visitor who has deleted cookies will be considered a new visitor when returning to your site.
In an upcoming post, we’ll look at another new feature advanced segments feature that complements User scope: Sequences.
