Google Analytics segments: the ultimate guide to user discovery

If you want to identify factors that lead to low conversion rates or know why some of your landing pages have a higher bounce rate than others, you need to understand why people are leaving in the first place. And to understand that, you’ve got to understand your users. 

Who are these people? How did they find you? Are they new users, old customers, casual visitors, or first-time buyers? Are they on a mobile device or tablet? And most importantly: are they finding what they're looking for on your site?

Segments in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) give you all the information you need to discover who your users are and what drives them to convert.

What is a segment in GA4?

A GA4 segment is a subset of your web traffic and user data.

This means that Google Analytics users can apply segments to filter aggregate data and focus on particular groups of website visitors—for example, visitors from a certain country, visitors using mobile, or visitors who landed on your site from a specific search engine query.

Now, you can also create segments from fundamental user behaviors, like:

• Registered users

• People who search for items on your site 

• Checkout starters 

• Cart abandoners 

You might’ve been familiar with how segments worked in Universal Analytics (UA), which let you choose between pre-created segments (system segments) or create your own (custom segments). But ever since Google replaced UA with Google Analytics 4 in late 2023, there are different segments at your disposal.

What are the different types of segments in GA4?

GA4’s segment builder lets you create different types of segments, both from suggested default segments (known as ‘audience references’) and entirely on your own. 

There are 3 main types of segments you can set up to break down your aggregate web traffic data:

1. User segments: this filters data by user criteria—for example, users who’ve added items to their shopping cart or those who’ve made purchases from your site before

2. Event segments: this filters data by different triggered events—for example, users browsing on various operating systems or email sign-ups from a specific date range

3. Session segments: this filters data by logged sessions—for example, by the date of a user’s first session or the number of sessions that occurred in a particular marketing funnel

You can also customize the conditions for each segment by selecting dimensions like the geographic region or users who shop during a certain time of the day.

Benefits of using segments in GA4

Segments make Google Analytics reports more focused and useful by filtering aggregate data to give you specific information about the traffic in your reports. 

It lets you delve into who your traffic is made up of, how users found you, and how different types of users behave when they visit your site, so you can make better choices about how to drive traffic, convert users, develop your product, and improve the customer experience with segmentation.

Here are 3 practical examples of how to use GA4 segments:

1. To understand why a section of your site is getting more user engagement, use segments to see who’s engaging with that section. You could then use that insight to optimize other parts of your site more for those visitors.

2. Segments let you see whether users found your site organically or came from a paid ad, which would tell you how useful your paid campaigns are, so you can decide whether to invest more in similar campaigns—or stop them altogether

3. Build personas for different demographic groups by segmenting traffic by age and gender, then build your site or product to appeal to their individual wants, needs, and preferences

You could also segment users who watched a video on a landing page to see if videos are helping your business, contrast the user behavior between Facebook and Twitter visitors to see which platform is best to advertise on, or look at ecommerce tracking data to see how people shop on your site.

For example, if you found that users from Europe make up only 3% of your traffic, you might decide to focus all your new content on US and Canadian users. If you saw that paid search users accounted for only 5% of your traffic but had high conversion rates, you could act on that insight by investing more in Google Ads campaigns.

An example segment exploration in GA4

How to set up segments in GA4

Log in to your Google Analytics account and follow the steps below to start using GA4’s segment builder. 

1. Go to ‘Explore’

From the GA4 dashboard, navigate to the ‘Explore’ tab on the left-hand sidebar.

The ‘Explore’ tab allows you to create custom reports 

2. Create a segment in Explorations

To use the segment builder, start a new exploration or modify an existing one.

GA4’s Explore tab comes with a number of templates to get you started with custom reports quickly 

3. Name your exploration and add a segment

Give your exploration a descriptive name, then click the + symbol to create a new segment.

Head to the ‘Variables’ panel and click the plus symbol to create a new segment  

4. Build a new segment

You can opt for modifying one of the prebuilt segments:

There’s a wide selection of prebuilt audience segments to choose from

Or you can create a custom segment from scratch:

Building a custom segment from scratch 

5. Add a new condition

Click the ‘Add new condition’ drop-down menu to select your segment criteria.

Select ‘Add new condition’ and a menu will appear 

Then, locate the criteria you want to segment, like sessions that started from a specific Google ad campaign.

Your Google ad campaigns will appear on a dropdown menu automatically 

6. Add more conditions

Add more condition criteria to narrow down your segment subset data—for example, all users who converted from your Google ad campaign.

Specify any extra conditions, and hit ‘Apply’

You can configure advanced segments by combining 3 different types of conditions:

1. Dimension conditions: criteria like demographics, geographic region, or device

2. Metric conditions: predictive criteria like projected purchasing metrics

3. Event conditions: event details

Keep in mind that you can include users who currently meet the criteria you selected or expand to users who have met the criteria at some point—just toggle the ‘At any point in time’ checkbox.

Toggle on ‘At any point in time’ by selecting this option from the checkbox. 

3 ways to use experience intelligence tools alongside Google Analytics segments

Segmented quantitative data gives you information about your user groups, the pages they visit, and their actions—so GA4 segments are a good starting point, but they don’t tell you about your users’ intentions, opinions, or experiences.

To really understand your users, you need to conduct quantitative and qualitative user research. Take advantage of qualitative data that experience intelligence tools (like Contentsquare 👋) offer: watch visitors use your site, visualize their journey, and ask them questions along the way.

Here’s a roundup of Contentsquare’s experience analytics tools to help you contextualize the insights you uncover with GA4 segments. Our tools complement Google Analytics, so there’s no need to choose one tool over the other.

1. Heatmaps

GA4 segments give you insight into button clicks and other element interactions, but they don’t help you visualize how users scroll down a page or what areas attract their attention. Luckily, that's what heatmaps do. 

You can filter Contentsquare Heatmaps by device to uncover functionality issues and gain insight into how users experience your site—whether they’re on a desktop, tablet, or mobile.

Say you’re segmenting users by purchasers and non-purchasers and discover that users with a certain device or web browser aren’t completing purchases. Use heatmaps to find out if these users are missing something while browsing—maybe mobile users stop scrolling and exit your site before seeing your call-to-action button at the bottom of the page, while a key element in the checkout flow is broken for Chrome browsers.

With Contentsquare, you can create heatmaps to show where various user segments click, scroll, or move on a page. 

2. Surveys 

Surveys are quick to build and give you actionable qualitative insights. Use them alongside your insights from Google Analytics to find out what users need from you, in their own words.

For example, if Segments tells you that male users under 25 aren’t adopting one of your features, and the bounce rate on a key landing page has gone up, embed a Contentsquare survey anywhere on the page to learn more about why users are leaving. You can even use User Attributes to ensure it’s only shown to relevant user groups. 

Or, let's say you’ve just created a new resource for returning users and want instant insight into their opinion of it. Set up an on-page survey to ask, “How would you rate this resource?”, and then filter for negative feedback to start investigating why that segment is displeased. It’s a fast and efficient way to get the user insight you need to optimize your site and product.

If none of our templates fit your use case, try Contentsquare’s AI for Surveys: just enter your research goal and watch AI generate an unbiased, effective survey in seconds. Once you’ve collected your data, use AI to generate a report that summarizes key findings and suggested next steps.

Use Contentsquare’s AI technology to generate a report from your survey responses 

3. Session Replay 

Segments won’t show you how users behave throughout an entire session, but session replays will. Use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to observe the complete user journey in a session—from entry to exit—and see where and why users got frustrated, what caught their eye, and what they responded to.

Session replays let you watch recordings of of user sessions and even leave comments on them for your colleagues to review

💡 Pro tip: once you’ve used GA4 to identify a segment you want to focus on, recreate a similar audience in Contentsquare to filter your session replays. This allows you to watch back videos of relevant users. 

You can save any pre-defined filter combination as a segment and return to relevant replays whenever you need in just a couple of clicks, which saves you time investigating recurring goals.

Save Session Replays filters as a segment

Discover more about your users

Google Analytics segments are fantastic for gaining quantitative insights about your site visitors. It’s easy to get started, experiment, and see user-focused information, so you can make key business decisions, fast. 

But even with segment conditions in place, you can’t get into your users’ minds and see your website from their point of view. Contentsquare’s experience intelligence tools let you empathize with your users and connect Google Analytics data to people’s feelings and experiences.

FAQs about Google Analytics 4 segments