Visitor Segment Not Showing Correct Data

[czmudzin]

I currently have a segment at the VISITOR level where Page Name DOES NOT CONTAIN pricing. However, when I build a freeform table in Workspace, and break down Page Name by Unique Visitors, pricing pages still show up. The only way to get the segment to work is at the hit-level, which makes no sense since Visitor is so much more broad. What can be the issue here?

[MandyGeorge · Accepted solution]

The way segments work is that it looks at a condition you specify (page not contain "pricing") and then brings in all of the information for the level you specify.

For example, if a visitor looks like this

visit 1 

page = pricing

page = other

visit 2 

page = pricing

visit 3 

page = other

If you have a visitor where page isn't pricing, it will see that the visitor above matches that condition (both visit 1 and 3 have a page that isn't pricing), so it will bring in ALL of the VISITOR information. The "does not contain" isn't an exclude, it's just saying find someone who saw something other than this. 

If you want to exclude that page, you would need to set your segment to "page contains pricing" and then EXCLUDE the container. The exclude will remove those pages so that they don't show up. Now, if you have a visitor level exclude container, it will exclude all information for any visitor that sees even 1 "page contains pricing". If you do the exclude at a hit or visit level, you will still have some of the pages showing, same issue as above. So keep that in mind.

If you're just trying to exclude a particular page from a list of pages, instead of building it into a segment, you could use "does not contain" in the filters directly on the dimension. Then you wouldn't have to worry about the segment bring in/excluding information you don't want it to.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

To add to this, though @MandyGeorge  did a great job... Visitor segments are about finding visitors who have ever met a specific criteria... (i.e. visitors who have ever made a purchase, visitors who have ever done a specific action, visitors that have never done something, etc).

The resulting data from such a segment will return all the actions those visitors have ever performed, limited then by the time frame and other criteria in your report (not that the criteria for the visitor segment looks at all time, it's not bound by report period... so if made a segment for Visitors who ever made a purchase, those purchases will not necessarily have been made in the time frame of your report - if you need that you need to use time frames built right into the segment to achieve that)

For what you are trying to pull (non-pricing pages), HIT is the correct scope to create your segment with. If you are trying to get the number of Visitors to that subset of pages, you add your UV metric to the freeform table with the segment that is removing the pages you don't want.

[czmudzin]

Thank you and I appreciate both versions of feedback - But is "Hit" really the scope that I'm after if I'm looking for people who have never visited a pricing page? I would assume excluding at the visitor level means that it would exclude all people who have ever had the pricing page in their cookie history.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Ahh.. ok... sorry, Visitors who have never visited a pricing pages is different.. and are you looking for "never ever", or "not in the last x days/x months/whatever)?

In that case, you do want visitors, but you actually have to use an Exclude rule to make this work.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

So you can build a segment like so:

Or if it must be in a time frame, let's use "Last Month" for an example:

^ So I am looking to exclude the specific page (or pages) within a specific time frame

Basically, a visitor may have made a purchase a few years ago, but hasn't recently would still be eligible to be returned by the segment.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

When dealing with Visits and Visitors... "does not contain" works very differently than "exclude"... whereas on Hits they are pretty much interchangeable....

[czmudzin]

After 8 years of using AA this is something I didn't know. Thanks for explaining.