Why does search act differently to segment and filter in Google Analytics

Question

If I go to a report and I do a search in the search box (1) I can filter the results. So on this screen I'm on the products result and I've decided to filter anything with a certain word in the product name. That works great.

I can also do an advanced filter and then I can add multiple AND/OR filters so I could have two (or more) product names.

When I try to use a segment (2 as seen in the image below) and do product contains "word" it doesn't seem to filter properly. It is not 100% of the results, so something is filtering, but it is not limited to just that word but far more.

Can someone explain why it doesn't work the way I think it works and how to achieve this?

As a secondary question, how can I get that search function to work in Google Data Studio. Neither filter or segment seems to work.

The results I get in Google Data Studio show no sessions which is not what shows in Google Analytics at all.

Answer 1

The difference you're seeing in the results of your table filter and your segment are due to the segment looking at sessions as a whole.

Call the product you're filtering on "Product A." The segment will only include sessions in which there was activity around Product A, but if a visitor looked at both Product A and some Product B during the same session, that Product B activity will also be included in the segment data.

The filter, however, will show or hide each row of the table based only on the contents of that row.

As a side note, for the kind of filtration you're interested in, a filter is probably preferable. If you have enough data to be subject to sampling, segments will always trigger sampling, but since filters do not require any recalculation, they never trigger sampling.

Without more information, I can't help with the Data Studio problem, but I hope this answers your main question.