Segment for Visitors who Took Action during a Time Frame

[#1]

I'm trying to create a segment of visitors who bought a particular product during a time frame. I've done the following:

• Created a custom time segment we'll call "Purchase Period"
• Created a segment with the following criteria:
  • Visitor with
  • visit that includes
    • Orders greater than 0
    • Product name is "My Product"
    • Time period is "Purchase Period"

This works great for activity during Purchase Period. The problem is, I want to use the segment to also look at activity by these users outside of Purchase Period. I believe that because I'm looking for a visitor with a visit that qualifies, it should work, but it's not. I get 0s for all activity outside Purchase Period. Any thoughts on how to make this work? I mean, I could try nesting it further looking for a visitor with a visit that contains a hit that meets these criteria, but I don't think that will work.

[#2]

long story short: using date ranges (in segments) is a mess! the reason is that the final segment does not behave as you would expect. as soon as you use a date range in a segment, the whole result of the segment is "bound" to the date range. that means even if you add a "visitor scope", you want get any values outside of the added date range (even if there is data outside and regardless the project date range!)

the "trick" is to use another date range long enough to match the desired project date range. but it's tricky because you might get unwanted values...

whenever I can, I would not use date ranges within segments, only for testing purpose (or short deep dives)...

[#3]

do you exclude anything? so instead of including 60, just make an exclude?

or: consider using the "contains any of" - or better a classification  

[#4]

Thanks. I was hoping there was a solution with actual custom date ranges, but it appears there isn't. I found a workaround. We have a prop that captures the day as a string and it's ugly, but I put in 60 OR statements to capture the date range. It works, but it's not the most elegant way of doing this. Adobe should really change the functioning of the custom date range feature.