Country Segmentation by URL subfolders

[TheMarianoC]

Hello,

I'm trying to create country and region level segments but I'm getting slightly confused with the results I'm getting.

I've created 17 segments, one for each European country we've got a specific URL for. i.e. /gb/ , /nl/ , /se/ and so on...

Here's the list and the results in unique visitors:

Then I created a regional segment by solely dropping all of those segments with OR conditions and I got this result:

So, there's 4K difference between one and the other one and I've no idea why as they are both using the exact same set of segments....

Please, help!?

Thanks

Mariano

[Urs_Boller]

hi

in your first table (with the bunch of segments) did you change the "total setting"? hoover over "segments" and open gear icon, change settings to "total based on all rows" (not the default sum). this will de-dublicate the visitors based on the segments.

I expect that the numbers will match after changing, the difference are those unique visitors who visited the page for different countries...

[TheMarianoC]

Hey, thanks for getting back to me.

That's something interesting and it actually fixed another discrepancy I had in another chart. However, even after doing this, I'm having the same 4K difference between the group of country segments and the segment made up of those...Same exact 4K difference.

[Urs_Boller]

further examination

a) change report window to not include Dec. 2018, means until end ov November. the issue might be a reporting window issue which is used in the backend

b) add the "europe" segment as new column to the top (with "unique visitors") to see if there is a difference in a single segment.

[TheMarianoC]

Hey, thanks for replying again.

Well... the result of that is just weird.

I've changed the date at the top right to see only Jan-Nov 2018. The same 4K difference.

Then I added the segment at the top and Unique Visitors as requested and this is what I got:

Even though the right column with the Europe segment says 383,807, the sum of all the results underneath is 387,847. Which is only about 100 difference from the sum of the left column:

I'm not sure what to make of that!

Also, whilst checking every segment separately I've noticed that the filtering is only working to some extent, meaning, I'm excluding some subfolders, like this:

But then when I analyse the segment's URLs, I still see some visitors on the subfolders I'm trying to include:

Because these are a minimal portion of the actual visitors in that country segment, my only theory is that these are users that visited both sites, however, if I'm creating a "Visitor" segment that excludes "Visitors" that navigated through those sections above, I would expect not to see these at all??

[Urs_Boller · Accepted solution]

ok, you have 2 problems in your table:

first, you are looking at unique visitors. I just wrote a longer answer to another question and explained why you can see "unexpected values" on the breakdown. read here: Mixed up sources of traffic - Referral / Typed/Bookmarked / Friendly URLs

(I know it is not the same breakdown, but the reason is the same)

second, your segment for "exclude" countries does not do what you expect. If you have a visitor segment and add condition "does not contain /es" you might get visitors from /es as well. why? because the segment is looking for all visitors who had at least ONE hit not containing /es. that means if somebody first was on /de, later on /es, he will match the segment (since the /de was the matching hit).

if you want to exclude visitors who have seen an /es page, you need to change the segment: use "visitors" and include "/es" the "exclude the whole container (use gear icon on the container on the top right)

let me know if you need to know more...

[TheMarianoC]

You sir... you deserve an award!

Thanks so much for both explanations, really helpful indeed!