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Home Define & Analyze Data Management Creating & Managing Segments
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Creating & Managing Segments

In this article you'll learn:

  • How to create, manage, and archive segments
  • Examples of types of segments that can be useful to create
View instructions for: 

Intro to Segments

To better understand particular cohorts of users, you can define segments to bring into your analysis. A segment in Heap is any subset of users based on a particular criteria defined by you. Examples of popular types of segments include:

  • Frequent buyers where users have made more than a certain amount of purchases (ex. three purchases per month)
  • Korra’s accounts where the Customer Success Manager of those accounts is Korra
  • Internal users where you group together your employees based on email or IP address to exclude them from analytics tracking
  • Canadian visitors where the users’ initial country is Canada

Note that segments only give you access to user-level properties. However, you can create and filter for an event to use as your segment.

Segment daily, weekly, or monthly active users

Heap comes with a set of predefined user segments for daily, weekly, and monthly active users. To learn more about how Heap measures these segments and how to set started with them, see How does Heap measure daily, weekly, and monthly active users?

The segments Daily Active Users, Monthly Active Users, and Weekly Active Users as listed on the segments page

Segment by users who started, stopped, or re-engaged with an event

Heap offers a suggested report that allows you to define user segments based on whether users have just started, consistently, stopped, never or re-engaged with a certain event. See our Active Usage Analysis guide to learn more.

The "Active Usage Event" section of the suggested report 'What is the actual makeup of my active user base?'

Creating Segments

To create a segment, navigate to Define > Segments within Heap and click the + New Segment button. On the page that appears, define the name, category, and filters for your segment.

A Segment can be defined based on any combination of behavioral actions and user-level properties. See the examples below of popular types of segments you can create in Heap.

Big Spenders (high purchase volume)

You could define a segment called Big Spenders for all users with greater than 10 purchases.

A 'Big Spenders' segment filtered by Users who have done a count of Purchase greater than 10 at any time

Power Users (completed an event multiple times)

You can track power users by defining a segment for all users who have done the event more than, say, 10 times per month.

A segment 'power users' filtered by users who have done a count of click - analyze suggested report greater than 10 in past 7 days

My Accounts (account by CSM/AM)

You can segment users based on the Customer Success/Account Manager that owns those accounts via properties that come with our Salesforce Integration.

A segment 'Cookie M's accounts' filtered by Contact Owner Name equals Cookie Monster

Internal Users (your employees)

We recommend creating a segment of your internal users to filter out of analysis so your results will be as accurate as possible. Here’s how we have that segment defined in Heap.

'Heap Users' segment filtered by Identity contains heapanalytics.com or heap.io

The Identity property in the screenshot above is only available if you configure our Identify API to capture an identity for your users. See our Using Identify guide for fulls steps to manage identity in Heap.

When conducting analysis in report modules later on, you can limit the data to users who are in any of these segments, or directly compare the behavior of one of these segments to users who do not fall into the segment. You can also directly compare multiple segments, such as the performance of cohorts from particular marketing channels.

Time-bounded Segments

Time-bounded segments are a type of segment that allow you to define a segment in terms of whether a user has done a specific event within the last day, week, or month. This means that the segment’s membership changes every day. These type of segments can be graphed using Size of Segment, or used as filters for other queries.

Let’s look at an example. You could define an Active Users segment as users who have logged in at least once within the last week.

The Edit Segment Criteria section  where the filter 'Users who have done Submit Any Login in past 7 days' is applied

Size of Segment

The size of a segment is calculated at midnight each day, and if you graph this for the prior 7 days segment using Size of Segment, each day’s data point will represent the number of users who logged in at least once in the past 7 days leading to that point. In prior day, it’s the past 24 hours.

Filter

The segment’s behavior changes when used as a filter. Unlike the above example, in a prior 7 days segment, a filter is applied to the event being analyzed, and is calculated as the prior 7 x 24 hours (168 hours) from the moment that the query is run. So, running a query for the Count of Sessions in the past month, filtered by users in our Active User segment is the same as saying, “Of all the users who have logged in at least once in the past 168 hours from now, show me the sessions they had each day in the past month”.

Managing Segments

Reviewing & Updating Segment Details

Once you’ve defined a segment, you can review it by navigating to Define > Segments, searching for the segment, and clicking on it in the list that appears.

The list of segments with the 'Active Users' segment selected

On the segment details page, you can see the following:

  • An Analyze this segment option, which opens up a graph of the count of the segment over the past 7 days
  • The segment history (when it was created, verified, and last edited)
  • Any notes added to the segment
The summary section of the segment details page

Directly below that, you’ll see an analysis preview, and below that, a section listing all of the Heap Connect destinations this segment is currently synced to.

The Heap Connect Destinations section of the segment details page

You can edit the segment definition in the Edit Segment Criteria section further down the page, and review the full segment history at the bottom.

The history section of the segment details page

Organizing Segments

To categorize segments into categories, simply click the Uncategorized text when creating or editing the segment, then enter the category name. You can also create new categories in this area.

The category 'Product New users' is added to the '1st month users' segment

To categorize several segments at once, select the checkmark next to them where they are listed on the Segments page, then click Move at the top.

An arrow pointing to the 'move' button on the segment details apge

A pop-up will appear where you can select an existing category or create a new one by simply typing the new category name.

The 'move to category' pop-up with the Product Ops category selected

Archiving Segments

To archive a segment, from the Define > Segments page, click the segment to open up the event details, then click the archive icon in the top-right.

An arrow pointing to the 'archive' button on the segment details page

To archive multiple segments at once, from the segments tab, click the checkboxes next to the segments, then click the archive button at the top.

Multiple check boxes next to segments selected, and an arrow pointing to the 'archive' button on the segment details page

Restoring Archived Segments

See the Restoring Archived Definitions section of the Data Cleanup guide for complete steps to restore archived segments.

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Last updated April 13, 2020.

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