Segment your results

By default, Optimizely Web Experimentation and Optimizely Personalization show results for all visitors who enter your experiment. However, not all visitors behave like your average visitors. Segmenting lets you filter your unarchived experiment results to see if certain groups behave differently from your visitors overall. 

You can filter results in the Optimizely Experiment Results page and Optimizely Personalization Campaign Results page with the following default segments that Optimizely captures automatically:

• Browser type
• Campaign
• Device type
• Referrer
• Source type

You can also add custom attributes to your experiments and campaigns and use these attributes for custom segmentation to get a more granular view of your business's most important visitors.

For example, you run an experiment that tests a pop-up promotional offer. This generates a positive lift overall, but segmenting visitors on mobile devices is a statistically significant loss. Maybe the pop-up is disruptive on a mobile device or difficult to close. When you implement the change or run a similar test in the future, you might consider excluding mobile visitors based on what you have learned.

Segmenting results helps you see beyond the average visitor's behavior and improve your experimentation program.

Default segments

In the Segment drop-down list, you see default segments and custom segments for any attributes assigned to at least one visitor in the experiment.

1. Go to your Results page.
2. Click Segment and select one or more attribute values from the drop-down list.
3. Choose Match All Values or Match Any Value if selecting multiple.
4. Click Apply.

Match All Values and Match Any Value

When you select more than one attribute value from the segmentation menu, the Results page can display visitors who match all values or visitors who match one or more values. The radio buttons control this behavior, labeled Match All Values and Match Any Value.

For example, you implement two custom attributes to track a visitor's location and plan type. If you want to see how visitors in the United States (US) with a Gold plan responded to your variations, your segmentation configuration looks like the following:

Match All Values

• Location – US
• Plan Type – Gold

If you select Match Any Value instead, the Results page displays data for visitors who are in the US combined with data for visitors who have a Gold plan.

How visitors are counted in segments

For information on how Optimizely counts conversions when segmenting, see the following:

• How Optimizely counts conversions
• How attributes and segmentation work

Geo results segmentation

If your Optimizely plan includes geo-location for audiences, you can use Optimizely's geo-location script to obtain location information, fetch geo data using Optimizely's (Akamai's) geolocation service, and pass it as a custom attribute in Web Experimentation for segmentation, such as segmenting results by visitors in the US.

Prerequisites

To use geolocation features, ensure you have a global or site-wide experiment running with a location-based audience, such as an A/A test. This triggers the geo.js script, which fetches the visitor's location.

To load the geolocation snippet (geo.js)

• Ensure at least one experiment uses a geo-location audience. Without this, the visitor's location is not fetched.
• Run a dummy experiment with a geo-audience, even if you do not plan to use this information for any audiences.
• Ensure the dummy experiment runs on pages where you need geolocation data. This lets you track events for the experiment and segment your audience effectively.

Steps

The following steps describe how to retrieve the country from the location object and pass it to a custom location attribute.

1. Create an experiment with an audience that targets a location (any location). This ensures that the geo.js script is loaded on the page, which in turn adds a location object to the Optimizely visitor object.
2. Create custom attributes to leverage the available geo parameters, such as city, continent, country, Designated Market Area (DMA), and region.

3. Add the relevant code snippet to your Project JavaScript to subscribe to the onActivated notification listener. See the the developer documentation on activated for information.

   window.optimizely = window.optimizely || [];
   
   function onActivated() {
     let visitor = window.optimizely.get('visitor');
     let country = "";
     if (visitor.location.country) {
       window.optimizely.push({
         "type": "user",
         "attributes": {
           "location": visitor.location.country,
         }
       });
     }
   }
   
   window.optimizely.push({
     type: "addListener",
     filter: {
       type: "lifecycle",
       name: "activated"
     },
     handler: onActivated
   });

4. Define your attributes within the callback function.

   let visitor = window.optimizely.get('visitor');
   let country = "";
   if (visitor.location.country) {
     window.optimizely.push({
       "type": "user",
       "attributes": {
         "location": visitor.location.country,
       }
     });
   }

Now, you should be able to view the segmented results in the Results page.