Building a sequential segment

Hi @katerynaos ,

Very first thing I want to bring into your attention is that the segment needs to be visitor level as you are looking at the context of Visitors and this will not hold true for visits. I tried to build your segment with and without exclusion and I am getting 100% overlap in venn. Maybe try with visitor and see if this works?

So there’s a few things with your segment here. First, as was already mentioned, it does need to be at a visitor level, not visit. The level that you put your segment at determines where it’s going to look for the conditions and what it’s going to return. A visit container means that everything that happens has to be in the same visit. Since you want at least six months, it has to be visitor, no visit is going to last six months.

The second thing is more of just something to keep in mind. If a customer refreshes their cookies or uses a different browser/device, they are going to appear to be a different customer. So while a lot of visitors will still be using the same ID, it is possible that some aren’t going to be captured because they’ve reset their cookies or changed devices.

Next, the actual sequential segment. If I understand you want the conditions:
bought brand A once
bought not-brand A in six months

The actual logic gets a bit complicated. You want a visit with a hit where they bought brand A. Then you want a purchase without brand A, so you need two conditions, one of buying non-brand A and one of excluding anyone who does buy A. I think that the logic that you want will be something like this. 

The exclude logic should be at a visitor level, not hit or visit. If you're using a hit exclusion, you're just excluding the individual hit that had brand A, meaning the visitor could have still bought brand A and it would bring in everything else. But if you exclude at a visitor level, it means that there was no brand A purchase at all.

@jennifer_dungan is the real segment expert, perhaps she can weigh in too about the logic below.