Creating Regional Segments from OOTB US States Dimension

[#1]

The ‘US state’ dimension reports the state of the visitor in the United States of America. Dimension items include regions and the country that the region resides in. Example values include "California", "Texas", or "Virginia". The dimension item "Unspecified" includes all international traffic outside of the United States. The below screenshots show the values within the ‘US state’ dimension. In this example, we will segment US States using the subsequent regions: Southwest, Southeast, Northeast, Pacific, Midwest, mid-Atlantic.

How to Build:

1. Identify the number of regions you will create segments for and generate a list of the states that fall under each region name.
2. Set the segment container to include “Hit.”
3. Drag and drop each state that belongs to the respective region. Use the “OR” operator to include all appropriate states in the segment. You can also add a comma-delimited list of states by setting the segment logic to “equals any of.”

4. Title the segment as the region’s name.
5. Hit “Save.”
6. Repeat steps 1-5 for each regional segment you create.
7. Drag and drop the regional segments into a Freeform Table and add whichever metrics you’re looking to measure. In this example, we will use “Visits” and “Unique Visitors” as metrics, as shown below:

8. Highlight all rows and right click.
9. 

   Navigate to Visualize > Bar Stacked to create a visualization that displays Visits and Unique Visitors by region.

10. Validate your regional segments by breaking them down by the “US State” variable.

Options for Scaling:

Take this use case one step further by placing a specific Campaign Name value at the top of the panel to understand the effectiveness of your geo-targeted marketing campaigns.

[#2]

For those not in the US, many larger countries have their geographic provinces / states / counties / etc available in the "Regions" dimension. You can use a similar method to create groupings that make sense for you.

Whether those grouping be "North", "East", "South", "West" and "Central"... or more specific naming conventions like in Canada "Territories", "Prairies", "Maritimes", etc...

If your country is smaller, and doesn't have Regions, you should still be able to use the "Cities" dimension to break down, though it will be a longer list of items that you need to group....

This is a great post, but don't want the international users to feel left out of the fun

We also have to watch out for IP Obfuscation, which could make some of this information inaccurate...