Name: Google Analytics Tutorial - Using the Explorations tool
Uploaded: 2025-07-26T18:41:17.000Z
Duration: 5 min 20 s
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Basic passive voice

The more in-depth and custom reporting area of Google Analytics is almost entirely based on user segmentation.

Advanced segments, user properties, events, dimensions, and audiences are all available in the Explorations tool of report building here.

Transition words & phrases

It's appropriate that they're called Explorations because this tool is used to create ad hoc reports and it's meant to be used in the interface rather than elaborate dashboards and full presentation type reports.

After selecting Explorations, you'll get to a screen with different options for custom reports and interactive visualizations.

Once you're familiar with the different methods available, building these Explorations can become an ongoing process for analysis.

You'll also have the ability to build Explorations in the Google Merchandise Store demo account since edit permissions are not required.

Anything you do here, along with your own account, will not affect the data or permanently alter any other reports.

And as another note, exploration reports are sometimes referred to as advanced analysis reports.

I'll select the option to create a free-form exploration.

This is a canvas and all of your options will be in the left panel.

Upon first look, it seems like you're limited to only a few segments, dimensions, and metrics, but before you create reports, you can pull in what you'd like to use instead of or in addition to this default configuration.

Your variables are in the panel for you to apply anywhere.

It's kind of like organizing a toolbox because the drawer will stay the same throughout all of your Explorations, even if you add additional tabs.

There's a lot here and you aren't limited to tables and free-form reporting.

If you'd like a visualization instead, you can switch to those at the top of techniques and change it to something like a donut chart or a scatterplot.

To create a new segment, select the plus option under the variables column.

If you've used the audience or comparison tools, this will look very familiar.

Segments give you the opportunity to use custom conditions in addition to the templates as well.

I can go to the custom option, choose a scope, and define the subset of users who are engaged with the content and have had at least five page views.

I could also take it a step further and add an engagement event around scroll.

What this event will do is track when users get to 90% of the way down a page.

After that, the dimensions of the measurements need to be added.

Because the merchandise store has campus products that relate to specific cities, I'm going to keep city, but move it to columns instead of rows.

Then I can use audiences in these reports too.

If I add audience name as a dimension, I can create a table for another level of segmentation comparison.

There are also filters, so I'll add a filter to just look at San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California to see the target group for those specific campuses.

Get a little more advanced, I'll use regular expressions and choose matches regex.

The reason I'll do that is because I want this filter to cover both cities in say San Francisco or Sunnyvale.

And in regular expression, one of the most useful symbols is that or symbol, which is the up and down pipe right above your return key.

Now I'm only looking at those two cities and also still I'm just looking at the segment of engaged users with over five page views and also scrolling activity.

Values can be nested, so I can add another layer of comparison by adding first user medium to see how we acquired these engaged users.

Now that segments and dimensions are available, they can be applied and reapplied in multiple exploration tabs.

With explorations, there are also reporting methods and visualizations that were previously only possible using SQL, custom code or pulling the data out of Google Analytics.

Now hours of manual analysis are saved, so it's a useful part of the platform that can be part of your overall segmentation workflow.