The insights in Botify Analytics reports grow exponentially when you evaluate them by segment. Segments are categories of your site pages with which you can filter Botify reports. With segments, Botify groups URLs by the rules you define to classify your website’s pages according to your site type, structure, or business goals. We refer to a project's full set of segment rules as the project segmentation.

Evaluating your site performance by segment is crucial since different page types typically have different traffic goals. For example, an e-commerce site would want to know if most category list pages are not generating visits, while there would be less concern for traffic volume with pagination. These insights are only available with defined site segmentation in Botify. Since your website’s structure is unique, it can be challenging to identify an issue in one section of your site when your reports only show your site as a whole, especially if your site is very large. Segmentation lets you evaluate your site by manageable groups for a more granular view.

When you define segments in your Botify project, you can answer questions such as:

This article provides a walkthrough of segmentation in your Botify reports. Refer to the links at the bottom of this page to get started creating your project segmentation.

The following are a few examples of visualizations by segment in Botify SiteCrawler reports:

SiteCrawler > Overview > Structured Data Distribution by Segment

​SiteCrawler > Distribution > Segments > Indexable URLs by Segment

​SiteCrawler > Performance > Segments > Load Time by Segment​

​SiteCrawler > HTTP Codes > Segment > URLs By Segment and HTTP Status Code

Classifying your site pages by segments reveals the full value of Botify through performance, structure, and content data reported by the categories most important to you. In addition to the examples shown above, there are many ways to view your data by segments in Botify, including:

There are three methods for filtering Botify reports by segments:

You can apply one or more segments globally to all reports within a Botify capability. In the following example, we filter all SiteCrawler reports by the Football and Recruiting article page types:

The selected segment filters are preserved when you navigate away from and return to the current capability; however, they are not selected if you navigate to another capability (i.e., in the above example, the Football and Recruiting article page types will not be selected when navigating to RealKeywords).

Segment filters are saved until you remove them by clicking the X next to the selected filters at the top of the page:

As with other Botify fields, you can filter reports by segments using field filters. Your defined segments are included in the URLs category:

When using the field filters for segments, your segments are shown as levels, with Level 1 being the segments at the top of your segmentation structure and Levels 2 and 3 being the subsegments. When you select a level, the "Equal to" qualifier displays the matching segments and the number of URLs in each segment.

Segment KPIs are displayed at the top of the report when a segment field filter is applied (number of URLs and visits in SiteCrawler, clicks in RealKeywords):

For a shortcut to applying a segment field filter, click on a segment in a chart while pressing the <CTRL> key on a PC or <Command> key on a Mac. The report will automatically filter for that segment.

You can also use your segments as columns in Explorer reports:

The Insights sections in SiteCrawler reports link to detailed reports with data by segment:​

Click the pie icon to view the segment charts:

Customize your segments in Botify reports with your preferred colors:

This example demonstrates evaluating HTTP codes returned during Botify’s crawl by page segment.

The data in this Segments section of SiteCrawler’s HTTP Codes report is reassuring since it shows most redirects are in login pages, as expected. If many 3xx URLs were internal redirects leading to content with traffic potential, we would want to dig deeper since that content deserves to be linked directly, not through redirect hops.

It can be challenging to see segment distribution for every indicator in this high-level view. For example, we cannot see "404 - Page Not Found" errors clearly since these pages represent a small amount of the website's overall volume and are spread over several segments. Navigate to the Insights section of the HTTP Codes report for a more granular view, including the segment distribution for these 404s:

We can even zoom in further to see subsegments. For example, the pages in the “artist” segment shown in the example below represent a small percentage of the segment, but they are key pages to generate top to middle-tail traffic on the site. We can apply a report filter to look only at Artist pages returning HTTP 404 by clicking on the pie section while pressing the <CTRL> key on a PC or <Command> on a Mac:

To see where these error pages are linked from, click on the pink pie section to display a URL Explorer report (do not press <CTRL> or <Command> while clicking this time). This provides the list of source pages where we can update the links.

See also: