How to compare Google Analytics Segments by blending data in Google Data Studio
In today’s post I’m going to show a very simple but effective way of blending data in Google Data Studio.
Rather than blending different data sources, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we’re going to be blending three different segments from the same Google Analytics account.
The first step is to add your Google Analytics data source. In this example I’ve used the master view from the Google Merchandise store.
Let’s first create a time series chart that look at sessions over time.
Let’s copy and paste that chart twice, so we have three charts all measuring sessions.
The next step is to add a Google Analytics segment to the chart.
We can click ‘Add a segment’ on the right of the screen.
For today’s example, we’ll start with choosing ‘Paid Traffic’ from the System segments list.
Our first chart is now only showing Paid Traffic.
We can rename the ‘Sessions’ metric to ‘Paid Traffic Sessions’. This will be useful later when we need to blend the data.
We now have our Paid Traffic Sessions chart, showing only sessions from the Paid Traffic segment.
Next, we need to change the two other charts to show only Referral Traffic and Organic Traffic respectively.
We can add the filters and rename the sessions metric, as shown below.
We now have our three separate charts showing Paid Traffic, Referral Traffic and Organic Traffic segments.
Blending the Segment Charts together
The next step is to blend the three charts together.
To do this, select all three charts.
Next, right click and choose ‘Blend data’ from the menu.
A new chart will be created. This chart combines the Paid Traffic, Referral Traffic and Organic Traffic segments together in one chart.
We can move the chart down, and in this example I’ve decided to keep the three original charts and have a combined chart.
To make things easier to comprehend, we can change the colour of the Referral and Organic traffic charts to match the blended data chart.
And we have our finished product, a Google Data Studio report that shows Paid Traffic, Referral Traffic and Organic Traffic segments as separate charts and combined into one chart.
The actual report is below.