How does adobe process multiple segments appended to workspace

[colek93887464]

Hi, I was wondering how AA processes data whenever there's multiple segments (of varying container logic - visit & hit level) appended to a specific workspace. Consider this scenario with 3 visits below:

segments applied

-visit level (include) | page = home

-hit level (include) | page = winter boots

1 -  [ [home page] [winter boots] [about us] [contact us] ] 

2 - [ [winter boots] [about us] [press releases] ]

3-  [ [home page] [about us] ]

does AA technically always go through the largest hierarchical segments first then to the most granular (process visitor level based, visit level, then hit level segments) I'd assume this is the case? I ask because if it goes from hit level then to visit wouldnt this happen?...include the 2 'winter boots' hits (in visit 1 & 2) from the above since they meet hit level criteria, so now only 2 hits are in the dataset, then apply visit level segment that looks to see if the remaining visits,1& 2, have a hit with home page in them... now only visit 1 would meet this segment criteria...at this point, will AA in this type of scenario ever include all the hits in visit 1 (4 total)? if it goes from largest to smallest in terms of outermost container logic, visit level then to hit level, this processing makes more sense... include all visit data for visits 1 & 3 since they have home page within them, then only select the hits where 'page = winter boots' , so visit 1 ( hit #2). just curious how this sort of processing works since i couldn't find very specific articles in the help section on this.

[fsakjlfdsakljfd · Accepted solution]

If you stack or add multiple segments it will essentially behave like the cross section of a Venn Diagram.
So if you stacked the two segments below, it would only return hits to the winter boots page, that occurred in visits in which users also viewed the home page.
Only the first visit would be included if those segments are stacked, but it will only return values set with the winter boots hit.

This references segment stacking:
https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/analytics/components/segmentation/segmentation-workflow/seg-b...

[colek93887464]

AA explains this in a very vague manner and doesn't give examples of multiple segments being applied of different hierarchies (hit/visit/visitor)..

"You can apply more than one segment to a report (this is called segment stacking). When multiple segments are applied, the criteria in each segment is combined using an 'and' operator and then applied. There is no limit to how many segments you can stack."

So going back to my example...I'm assuming then that when AA sees a hit based segment combined with a visit based segment it behaves differently as in it doesn't bring in the rest of the hits from the visit in question as a normal visit based segment would (so in my example, that would be 'home page' , 'contact us', 'about us')? So if that's the case then, AA is likely processing largest to smallest from visit level to hit level?