About Segments in Matomo

Cloud On-Premise

Segments allow you to filter your analytics data to analyse specific groups of visitors, behaviours, or traffic sources. This helps you focus on the data that is most relevant to your analysis.

You can manage and create segments from the Visitors > Segments page, or the Segment editor in the dashboard.

The Segments page provides a central place to view, organise, and update your segments. Managing segments from the segment selector can be limiting, especially when working with multiple segments. (Available in Matomo Cloud and coming soon to On-Premise.)

new segment page

Even though it is useful to collect data about every website visitor, you may want to analyse certain types of website visitors. The following example segment configuration is defined to only show mobile visitors:

The criteria to define these segments is based on the data collected within your analytics. Below you’ll find some some common themes that can be used to create segments:

  • Visit Based Segments – You can create segments based on people’s visit patterns. Do first time visitors exhibit different traits to returning visitors? Or perhaps people that arrive on specific landing pages experience your site differently to those landing on your blog?
  • Interaction Based Segments – If you have configured Events or Goals on your website, you can create segments to differentiate the traffic of those who have completed certain actions, or not. This might help you reveal wider trends for visitors that complete desired actions.
  • Campaign Based Segments – Go beyond tracking the number of visits from your marketing campaigns. Gain deeper insights into the differing usage patterns of people arriving to your site from specific traffic sources, or advertising campaigns.
  • Ecommerce Segments – You could create customer segments to separate the traffic of those who made a purchase vs those who didn’t. You can even get really specific and compare the visits associated with purchasers of a specific product. The data may reveal different types of customers with unique browsing patterns.
  • Demographic Segments – It is possible to build segments based on the language of a user’s browser, or the location of their IP address, or any other custom dimension. While this may have some privacy implications, it can help you understand how these aspects impact what people do on your website.
  • Technographic Segments – The experience on your website can vary greatly depending on the device, or even the web browser, someone uses to access your site. Creating segments based on the technology a customer is using might reveal issues for certain platforms, or even different attitudes between users.

Hopefully you are starting to see the potential power of looking at smaller groups of your audience data. You can learn insights from segment analysis that might not be seen when looking at the combined data of every type of person visiting your site.