Today I stumbled upon an undocumented (or at best, minimally-publicized) limitation to Google Analytics’ advanced segmentation feature. It’s hard for me to knock what I think is GA’s best feature, but I’ve found that I can only create 100 advanced segments at a time. That may sound like a lot, but when you have more than a few Google Analytics accounts, it’s easy to start creating a lot of segments for yourself. In case you run into this like we often do at WebShare, here’s what you need to know and a workaround you can use.
In addition to the limitation to the number of segments, there’s an annoying little glitch when you try to create your 101st segment. Let’s say you’ve laid out your segment, named it, and tested it, as shown below:
Once you try to save your segment, you’ll end up receiving the following error. Notice how in addition to giving you the error message, Google wipes out your segment. It’s a minor thing, but it would be nice for Google to preserve our segments so that we could open up a profile in another tab and delete a pre-existing segment.
To be fair, there actually is a small warning notification when you try to create a 101st segment. It’s not very visible, though, so be careful.
As a workaround, you can create a “dummy” second login to use for GA. For example, if your username is user@example.com and you’ve run out of segments, create a new username for yourself under “user+1@example.com” or something similar. Note that this works for any GMail account, but may not work on other email platforms. If that doesn’t work for you, simply create an entirely new login to get beyond 100 segments.
Nick Iyengar
Nick is a senior analytics and web intelligence analyst with WebShare. You can find out more about Nick here.
See more posts by Nick Iyengar
Tags: advanced segmentation
Nick, I just ‘stumbled’ upon this limit as well. At first, I felt a little embarrassed that I didn’t know of the restriction, but the more and more I look around, I realize that it’s not documented anywhere.
The limit would be irrelevant if Google would provide a read/write API, and we could move segments in an out of a user account. In fact, that ability would significantly improve collaboration, and even has the potential to create a marketplace for preconfigured complex segments.
I realized that a new account would be able to create more segments, but we’ve frequently got custom reports that go with custom segments, and we’ve got to move those, too, and I’m trying to figure out a consistent method that will scale.
Can you explain your gmail alias (+1) workaround in a bit more detail? I tried to go the the User Manager and give access to an alias of my primary gmail account, and got the message “This user does not have a Google Account.”
Tony, thanks for the comment. Your point about custom reports that employ advanced segments is well taken, and something that has often frustrated us here at WebShare as well.
The GMail alias idea – of creating something like login+1@example.com – unfortunately doesn’t allow you to get more segments for your login, as GA will treat this as a completely separate login. The benefit is that you don’t have to actually create/register a new email address. All notifications, etc., will get sent to your actual GMail address. So if you create a dummy login under login+1@example.com, you’ll get all relevant communications at your real email address: login@example.com.
100 segments may sound like a lot to an in-house Analytics user, but for agencies and consulting firms, 100 segments can be used in no time. What you may want to do until Google raises this limit is to clearly delineate which logins you use with which clients. You can use login@example.com for Clients 1-20, login+1@example.com for Clients 21-40, etc.
Hope this helps!
Thanks, Nick
My comment was a bit rambling. I grok the theory behind Gmail Aliases, and I totally agree how it could be of value here (saving me the step of having to create/register an additional email address)…I was just saying that I couldn’t get it to work.
Although login+1@example.com is a legitimate alias for login@example.com, GA doesn’t appear to honor that, and I was wondering if I was going about it the wrong way, and was hoping you could detail the process for creating a ‘dummy login’.
If I go to https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/create_user_handler , enter the alias in the Email Address field, select ‘Account Administrator’, and press ‘Save Changes’, Google Analytics returns me to that page with the message “This user does not have a Google Account.”
Hi Tony,
You may want to try going to Google.com/Accounts and registering a new Google Account under the GMail alias you’d like to use. Technically you can’t access with a Google Analytics account (lowercase a) without having a Google Account (capital A), so that’s probably the root of the issue.
Nick