It’s been a while but the wait was worth it! (Yes, we’re still here!)
Segments has been in demand FOR. EVER. and we could not be more excited to finally offer this to you. Think of it as the one-off segmentation we already offer, but integrated into nearly every report automatically and with almost no impact on speed. You can also sort the reports by any of these new columns. It’s pretty nice!
(A very important note, that this data for your main Content report is vastly different than any of the others, but for good reason. This is fully explained here.)
One reason we avoided doing this for so long is that we didn’t think we could make it happen without a drastic hit on performance. But a lot of creativity went into this on the backend and the results are great. One of the aspects of the great performance is data sampling for higher traffic sites. Don’t worry, we only do it for high traffic sites and/or large date ranges. It’s explained in full detail on the new Segments knowledgebase article.
If your site has more than 10,000 page views in the date/range being viewed, sampling takes effect on all data past the last 10,000 page views. By default it’s 25% but Pro Plus and higher members (Upgrade) can choose a few other options, including 100% if you really want it. You can change this setting on your user preferences page, or using the new sampling menu, next to the trend menu, so you can change it quickly as needed as you hop between sites.
We plan to make this new feature available via the API as well, but first we want to give it a day or two and see the impact this on our resource usage once thousands of people are using it at the same time. Just playing it safe.
There are various other tweaks and small changes with this release, but probably only one that many will notice.
Our old “family style” reports, e.g. browsers grouped by family (Firefox, etc) had to go the way of the dinosaur. They were a really nasty hack and anytime we made global updates to reports like this, it was always a huge challenge to get those changes into those family style reports. We’ve never had an update to all reports as big as this one though, so I just had to declare bankruptcy on that code and move on.
But I felt good about it, because the backend API changes I had to make for this new data structure allowed a lot more flexibility so this worked out well and it’s fast.
You can still view individual families. You’ll just have to use the new menu system I built into these reports, as you can see in the screenshot below. This affects Browsers, OS’, Hardware, Campaigns, Custom data — I killed the search engines one since there were only a few categories anyways, and if you use split tests, those are also not grouped by family anymore because even people who do use that feature tend not to have more than one or two total.
That’s all for now!
