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I work for a company that has a front facing business site that we use for marketing. We also have a login page that allows for our users/clients to log into the tools. There was a segment set up that excludes sessions from the pages that are within the tools. We also exclude traffic from the homepage "/". I notice that if I remove the homepage filter from the segment, that the unique pageviews of the front facing business-site pages increases.

For instance, when the filter is applied that excludes sessions from the homepage, our Contact page has about 17,000 unique views. If I remove that filter, our contact page unique pageviews jumps to 35,000. Is this expected behavior?

I just want to be able to filter out the traffic to the homepage and the internal pages, and not let it affect sessions/users/unique pageviews to the other pages I want. But it seems like it is affecting it, unless I have it set up incorrectly. Or maybe there is no way to do what I'm asking.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

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Segments aren't the best option here because they're designed to apply a set of conditions to all Sessions and/or all Users and subsequently segment that data from the entire dataset. What you're trying to do is just exclude a certain page (or set of pages) from the dataset, which is a bit different.

For instance, when the filter is applied that excludes sessions from the homepage, our Contact page has about 17,000 unique views. If I remove that filter, our contact page unique pageviews jumps to 35,000. Is this expected behavior?

Assuming you mean you're excluding sessions where the Landing Page exactly matches / (or an equivalent regex expression), I think it's completely believable that over 50% of your users are coming to the Contact page from the Home page. A good place to check for that information is in Behavior Flow.

Excluding Pages

To exclude a certain page (or set of pages), go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages and click on Advanced (located to the right of the little search bar). From there, you can exclude the Home page and it won't affect the rest of the dataset.

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Filtered View

You may also want to consider creating a new View and applying a filter that excludes based on the conditions Request URI matches regex ^/$ (or some other equivalent expression), which only excludes data for the Home page but includes data for the other pages. Just make sure to create a new View, as you should never apply a filter to the All Web Site Data view.

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  • Thanks! This makes sense. This definitely solves the issue for page views. But just to clarify, when viewing sessions, it seems like there's really no way to filter out people who only have a session on the homepage from those who may start their session on the homepage and then go to more pages that I do want to track. If I apply a filter removing session views for those who view the homepage (/), it will remove sessions for those who have viewed the homepage AND another page, correct?
    – Justin
    Commented Jan 23, 2016 at 20:19
  • To your first question: Check the Behavior Flow report. It will show you users that dropped off on the Home page and users that continued onward to other pages. To your second question: For the filtered view, that data will remain mostly intact. The filtered view will only omit data based exactly on the applied condition(s), so you'll still have data for all sessions and users that viewed > 1 page, but it won't include sessions and users that started and bounced from the Home page.
    – nburr
    Commented Jan 24, 2016 at 16:22

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