Segments in Google Analytics

Your Nyla landing page lives on a subdomain of your main site. If you’ve tried tracking performance of the page using Google Analytics’ built-in hostname field, you may have seen something like the following.

No conversions? That’s not good.

But wait – the issue is the structure of your report. Your Nyla landing page directs users back to your main site when they’re ready to check out. As a result, conversions do not take place on your landing page’s subdomain; they take place on your main domain.

So, if you only use hostname to analyze your landing page’s performance, you’ll never see conversions attributed to the landing page.

Segments.

Google Analytics offers configurable segments that can capture the nuance of your landing page’s traffic flow and give you the right insight into the performance of your Nyla landing page. Read more about segments in Google’s official documentation here.

The rest of this guide will help you set up segments for your Nyla landing page.

To get started, make sure you’re logged into Google Analytics. Then click on this link. This will open a pre-filled Segment in your Google Analytics account. You’ll need to make a couple of small updates to this segment to tailor it for your site.

In the first screen that appears, select “Any View” and remove the “-- TO SHARE” from the name of the segment. Click “Create.”

On the next screen, change “your landing page URL” to the URL of your specific Nyla landing page. This is typically shop.yoursite.com. Click save.

Now you’re ready to test it out. Head over to the “Channels” report (Acquisition - All Traffic - Channels). At the very top of your screen, click “Add Segment” and choose your new “Nyla Landing Page Users” segment and click “Apply.”

Now you’ll see something like the report below. Looks a lot better! Your new segment represents users who’ve hit your Nyla landing page, and it doesn’t restrict the data to actions only taken on the landing page’s hostname. In other words, the segment shows you users who’ve interacted with your Nyla landing page and includes actions they took on your main site as they browsed and purchased.

The above is great and gets good insight into your Nyla landing page users’ behavior across your site. But what does that data mean if not compared to the right baseline? If you don’t do any more configuration, your comparison from “Nyla Landing Page Users” to “All Users” isn’t quite right, because “All Users” includes all users – even Nyla landing page users.

For the best comparison, you’ll want to remove Nyla landing page users from the segment used to create your baseline comparison. This is actually pretty simple – you just need to invert the segment you created for Nyla Landing Page Users to remove users who hit the landing page.

To get started, click on the drop-down arrow at the top right of your new “Nyla Landing Page Users” segment and click “Copy.”

Name the new segment “Non Nyla Landing Page Users” and change “Include” to “Exclude” in the segment configuration. Click “Save.”

That’s it. Now you have two, mutually-exclusive segments that will create fair comparisons between users of your Nyla landing page and all other users. Your new comparison reports should look something like this:

You can use these new segments anywhere in Google Analytics. You can even use them in custom reports and automated reports that you might have set up.