One of the first things I do when configuring Google Analytics for a customer is to make sure they are able to analyze segments quite than some uniform blob of traffic which provides little insight into the performance of their website.

To do this, I'll create multiple filter & profile mixtures - and lots of them! Effectively, my profiles are the segments I'm most interested in for ongoing analysis and for optimization of traffic and conversions.

The clear segments are the main traffic sources: unrefined search, pay-per-click and referrals (I'm not too bothered about direct traffic) plus one each for new visitors and returning visitors. I may also create profiles that capture data for specific parts of the site - very useful for analyzing departmental content. For SEO, I'll create additional organic search profiles just for looking at traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

At this point, if you've played with Google Analytics to any extent, you'll be asking why you didn't just use the advanced segments functionality of Google Analytics. Good question. After all, advanced segments can be created on-the-fly and applied to existing data whereas a profile has no historical data when it's created - you have to wait to get a decent sample size before you can analyze anything meaningful.

So why do I love profiles? Because advanced sections, though great for ad-hoc segmentation, have limitations that will likely have you hitting an analytical brick wall. You'll know when you've hit it because you'll get the message "Advanced Segments: Disabled Learn Why".

Incidentally, this message is not very obvious and inexperienced users may not notice that their fantastic segment for returning visits from Aberdeen with a bounce rate of less than 30% and more than 4 pages per visit that actually purchased something (pause for breath), stopped being applied 15 mins ago…