Segments

Segments lives in the People area of the dashboard, under Audiences.

At a glance#

What it does#

Segments are saved, rule-based definitions of a group of users. Rules combine property comparisons — equals, not equals, contains, exists, greater/less than and their inclusive forms — and event conditions, into a tree you build in the editor. Each segment can be edited, reset, deleted, and opened to see its current members.

A segment is a definition, not a list. Membership is evaluated when it is used, so a user who stops matching leaves it without anyone doing anything.

When to use it#

Whenever you need the same group more than once — for messaging, for analysis, for comparing behaviour. Building it as a segment rather than an ad-hoc filter means the definition is written down and everyone is talking about the same people.

Compare with the neighbouring concepts:

Workflow#

1. 1

   Check the property names first

   Build against user properties, not against memory. A mistyped property produces an empty segment and no warning.

2. 2

   Start broad, then narrow

   Add one condition at a time and watch the size. A segment that is empty after four conditions gives you no clue which one did it.

3. 3

   Open the members drawer

   Read actual people before you act on the definition. It catches logic errors that a plausible count will not.

4. 4

   Name it for the rule, not the campaign

   "Trial users, no purchase, active in 7 days" survives. "March push" does not.

Permissions and prerequisites#

Requires identified users for anything person-shaped to be meaningful, and event ingestion for event conditions.

Limits and edge cases#

• Membership is evaluated at use time, so a segment's size changes on its own. That is the point, and it means a size you noted yesterday is not reproducible today.

• exists is not the same as not equals. A user missing the property entirely fails an equality test and passes a not equals one in most engines. Be explicit.

• Event conditions depend on your event names. A renamed event silently breaks the segment that referenced the old name.

• Empty is a valid result. It usually means a condition is wrong, not that nobody qualifies.

Troubleshooting#

Segment is empty and should not be. Remove conditions one at a time until it populates; the last one you removed is the problem. Nine times in ten it is a property name or a value case mismatch.

Size changed with no edit. Expected — the rule re-evaluates. If you need a frozen set, use an imported list.

Where the data comes from#

Served by

• Audiences

Related#

• Cohorts

• Audiences

• Suppression lists

• Imported lists

• People overview