Limits to Advanced Segmentation in Google Analytics

Today I stumbled upon an undocumented (or at best, minimally-publicized) limitation to Google Analytics’ advanced segmentation feature. It’s hard for me to knock what I think is GA’s best feature, but I’ve found that I can only create 100 advanced segments at a time. That may sound like a lot, but when you have more than a few Google Analytics accounts, it’s easy to start creating a lot of segments for yourself. In case you run into this like we often do at WebShare, here’s what you need to know and a workaround you can use.

In addition to the limitation to the number of segments, there’s an annoying little glitch when you try to create your 101st segment. Let’s say you’ve laid out your segment, named it, and tested it, as shown below:

Once you try to save your segment, you’ll end up receiving the following error. Notice how in addition to giving you the error message, Google wipes out your segment. It’s a minor thing, but it would be nice for Google to preserve our segments so that we could open up a profile in another tab and delete a pre-existing segment.

To be fair, there actually is a small warning notification when you try to create a 101st segment. It’s not very visible, though, so be careful.

As a workaround, you can create a “dummy” second login to use for GA. For example, if your username is user@example.com and you’ve run out of segments, create a new username for yourself under “user+1@example.com” or something similar. Note that this works for any GMail account, but may not work on other email platforms. If that doesn’t work for you, simply create an entirely new login to get beyond 100 segments.