Custom Segment Creation

1. What Are Segments and Why Are They Important?

At its core, a segment is simply a subset of your data. Instead of looking at all your website visitors at once, segments allow you to isolate and analyze specific groups. For a hotel, this could mean looking at:

• Guests from your primary international markets.
• Visitors who use a mobile device.
• Potential guests who viewed a specific room type but didn't book.

By isolating these groups, you can understand their unique behaviors, needs, and pain points, which is the first step toward creating more effective marketing campaigns and a better website experience.

In GA4, segments are created and used within the Explore section. They are much more powerful than the 'Comparisons' feature you find in standard reports because they can be more complex and can be saved to build audiences for your Google Ads campaigns—a topic we'll touch on later.

Let's start with a video that introduces the concept of segments and where to find them in GA4.

2. The Three Types of Segments: User, Session, and Event

Before you start building, it's crucial to understand the three different "scopes" or types of segments you can create. Choosing the right one depends on the question you're trying to answer.

• User Segment: Includes all data from users who meet your criteria at any point in time. This is the broadest scope.
• Session Segment: Includes all data from specific sessions that meet your criteria. This scope is focused on individual visits.
• Event Segment: Includes only the specific events that meet your criteria. This is the most granular scope.

Let's use a hotel analogy to make this clear:

The following video and article explain this distinction with excellent examples. Understanding this is key to building useful segments.

For a detailed written explanation, you can refer to the following resource.

In most of your analyses, you will likely be using User segments to understand the behavior of groups over time.

3. How to Build Custom Segments in GA4

Now for the practical part. Let's build a few segments that would be immediately useful for your hotel. We'll start by creating two simple segments to fulfill one part of our learning outcome: comparing mobile vs. desktop users.

All segment creation happens in the Explore section.

Example 1: Creating a "Mobile Users" Segment

1. Navigate to Explore in GA4 and open a new Free-form exploration.
2. In the Variables column, click the + icon next to the Segments title.
3. Select User segment.
4. Name your segment "Mobile Users".
5. Under "Include users when", click Add new condition.
6. Search for and select the Device category dimension.
7. Set the condition to exactly matches and select mobile as the value.
8. Click Save and apply.

You've just created your first custom segment! You can repeat these exact steps to create a "Desktop Users" segment by selecting desktop in step 7. Now you can drag both segments into a report to compare them.

The guide below provides excellent, practical examples of segments you can build, including the one we just discussed.

Example 2: Combining Conditions

Now let's create a more advanced segment that combines conditions using "AND" logic. Let's create a segment for "Users from the United States on Mobile".

1. Follow steps 1-3 from above.
2. Name your segment "US Mobile Users".
3. Add the first condition: Device category exactly matches mobile.
4. Click the AND button to add a second condition that must also be true.
5. For the second condition, search for and select the Country ID dimension.
6. Set the condition to exactly matches and select United States.
7. Click Save and apply.

You now have a segment that isolates a very specific, and likely valuable, audience for your hotel.

The following video walks through this process of adding multiple conditions.

4. Refining Segments with Exclusions

Sometimes, the most powerful way to define a group is by specifying who should not be in it. This is done using an exclude group.

A classic marketing use case for this is creating a segment for retargeting. For your hotel, you might want to find users who started the booking process but didn't finish.

You would define this segment as:

• INCLUDE users who triggered the begin_checkout event.
• EXCLUDE users who triggered the purchase event.

This gives you a clean list of users who abandoned their booking.

5. Segments vs. Audiences: Analysis vs. Action

When you create a segment, you'll see a checkbox that says "Build an audience". This is a critical feature that connects your analytics insights to your marketing actions.

• Segments are for analysis inside GA4 Explorations. They look at past data.
• Audiences are for activation in platforms like Google Ads. They are dynamic lists that users are added to or removed from as they meet the criteria.

By checking that box, the segment you created for "booking abandoners" becomes an audience you can target in Google Ads with a special "Complete your booking!" campaign. Given your goal of mastering paid advertising, this is a connection you will use often.

Conclusion

You've now learned how to move beyond default reports and create custom segments to analyze the specific user groups that matter most to your hotel. This is a foundational skill for gaining deep, actionable insights from your data.

Key Takeaways:

• Segments are subsets of your data used for detailed analysis in GA4's Explore section.
• You must choose the right scope for your question: User (lifetime behavior), Session (single visit behavior), or Event (specific actions).
• You build segments by including or excluding users based on conditions (like country or device) connected with AND/OR logic.
• Segments can be turned into Audiences for activation in your paid ad campaigns, bridging the gap between insight and action.

What's Next?

So far in this module, we've used explorations with pre-defined structures: the Funnel and the Path. We've now learned how to create the custom segments needed to make those reports even more powerful.

In our next lesson, "Build a free-form exploration in GA4 to answer a specific business question," we will take off the training wheels. You'll learn how to use the Free-form exploration tool to build a report entirely from scratch, combining dimensions, metrics, and the custom segments you just learned to create to answer unique business questions for your hotel.