Group similar pages together to make it possible to analyze their role in your website and the trends in their performance compared to other groups of pages.
What is segmentation and why do you need it?
Segmentation is a way of gathering pages into segments, or page groups, based on some characteristic. When you look at the crawl results using segmentation, you see trends and behaviors of that characteristic accross the different sections of your website.
A metric that takes into account a whole website can hide the real story, because different types of pages may perform very differently on this same metric. Page groups, and grouping page groups into segmentations, bring these differences to light.
Segmentations also allow you to view correlations between performance on one metric and performance on another. When looking at a chart of HTTP status codes and using a segmentation by publication date, you might be able to see an obvious correlation between the two that you could have supposed, but couldn't easily confirm.
A segmentation for number of impressions reported by Google Search Console, this site is able to see that while some of their redirected pages are often displayed to search users, all pages in 3xx chains earn exactly no impressions on Google:
Segmentations allow for this type of visually impactful analysis and storytelling.
Example:
On a media website, page speed, JS rendering, and core web vitals might be vital across the whole site, but might also be strongly affected by page template. Segmenting by page template may help you find template issues on your website. Segmenting by page load time might allow you to notice that page speed correlates strongly with both ranking in the SERPs and with the number of organic visitors: this might allow you to prioritize projects focusing on UX.
Other examples of segmentations can help you answer common technical SEO questions:
What types of pages on my site have the most errors? (Segmentation based on page type or template)
Is there a difference in how Google crawls my product pages based on their category? (Segmentation by product category)
Is my site's author profile block and schema markup impactful for E-E-A-T? (Segmentation by profile length or by schema presence)
Does my site correctly value its older evergreen articles? (Segmentation by article publication date)
Are products with the highest profit margin available to SEO visitors? (Segmentation by price or by profit margin)
Do duplicate content issues affect indexation on my site? (Segmentation by duplicate status)
Some of the advantages of segmentations in Oncrawl
In Oncrawl, you can have many segmentations, each containing a set of page groups (segments) based on simple or complex rules and taking into account any of hundreds of metrics available on the platform.
When you create a segmentation, it can be used to view to analyses that have already been completed as well as analysis that will be run in the future.
Segmentations can contain groups within groups, to better help you create sub-groups of pages on your site.
When looking at a report, a dashboard, or a chart, switch between segmentations, or create a new one if you don't yet have the right view of your data.
Default segmentations available in Oncrawl
Oncrawl provides several segmentation templates to help you get started.
URL Structure (Default)
The most common default segmentation is by URL structure. Oncrawl automatically looks at the first directory after your domain name. For the top level directories with the most pages, Oncrawl automatically creates page groups. For example, an e-commerce site might have the following page groups:
women: a page group containing all of the pages in the directory
https://www.my-example-shop.com/women/children: a page group containing all of the pages in the directory https://www.my-example-shop.com/children/
men: a page group containing all of the pages in the directory https://www.my-example-shop.com/men/
outlet: a page group containing all of the pages in the directory
https://www.my-example-shop.com/outlet/c: a page group containing all of the pages in the directory
https://www.my-example-shop.com/c/new-arrivals: a page group containing all of the pages in the directory
https://www.my-example-shop.com/new-arrivals/blog: a page group containing all of the pages in the directory
https://www.my-example-shop.com/blog/
For many sites, this corresponds to the website structure.
Using a template to add another segmentation
To use a different template, click on Create a segmentation from the project home page or from any report page.
Click on the Templates tab.
To use a template, click on its name to open a preview.
Click on Use this template to load the template into the segmentation editor, where you can make any changes or just save the new segementation.
What is the "Other" category?
Any URLs that don't fit into the different groups you set up within a segmentation are placed in the category "Other".
As we saw above, this might be pages that don't have the property that is used to create the segmentation. For example, the segmentation used below has a group for articles that were recently published or modified. Everything that is not part of that group is "Other".
When creating or editing a segmentation, use the + (Create new group) button when editing a segmentation to choose whether or not the "Other" group should be included in your segmentation.
If you choose to include it, a group will be created in your segmentation for all of the pages that aren't part of any other group in the segmentation. You'll see this "Other" group on all graphs, just like you always have. New segmentations will continue to include an "Other" group by default.
If you choose to exclude it, you won't see it anywhere in the crawl reports. This may make it much easier to read some charts. Keep in mind that without an "Other" group, your segmentation's total pages may not represent all pages on your website.
You can change your mind at any point. Go back to the segmentation editor to switch the "Other" group on or off.
Creating your own segmentation
We encourage you to create your own segmentation. You can do this before you crawl your site, after you crawl your site, while you're crawling your site...
You can modify the default segmentation or create a new segmentation for your site.
Set up and modify your segmentations from the Segmentation page:
From the project home page, click on the Configure Segmentation button
or
While looking at any analysis, click on the Configure Segmentation button at the top right of the page.
You can create a segmentation based on any information available in Oncrawl, whether it comes from a crawl or from another source.
This includes every single one of the Oncrawl metrics, such as:
Word count
Inlinks range
Page depth
URL structure
This also includes data from any third-party source.
Here are just a few examples of information that isn't included in Oncrawl by default:
Google Analytics: SEO Sessions
Server logs: Googlebot hits
Google Search Console: Page positions
Majestic: Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Number of backlinks
Data Scraping: Google Tags, Article publication dates, Sold-out product pages
Data Ingestion: Seasonal pages, Business KPIs
Note: If you're looking at a report that doesn't include the data used to segment your URLs, that segmentation won't be available. It'll show up again when you switch to a report that uses the pertinent information, though.
How to change segmentations when viewing analysis results
When viewing any analysis results, you can change the segmentation used to display the data in the charts.
At the top of the page, use the Segmentation drop-down menu to select one of the available segmentations.
Sometimes this menu is available by expanding the Filters menu.
You can also focus on only one of the page groups within the active segmentation by changing the group selected in the second drop-down menu, Base filter.
Segmentation best practices
Set multiple segmentations and don't hesitate to switch between them when looking at data.
Create pages groups inside of a main group. This multi-level segmentation allows to drill down into the details of a category.
You can download a segmentation from one project and upload it to another.
If you want to use a metric based on scraping or data ingestion in a segmentation, run the crawl first so that Oncrawl knows that the metric exists. Then create the segmentation.
Orphan pages will often be categorized as "Other" in a segmentation based on metrics including information from a crawl. Because they are not linked in the site structure, they haven't been crawled, and Oncrawl has no information on this metric for these pages. Use metrics from other sources (connectors, log data, or data ingestion) to include orphan pages in your page groups.
Going further
You may want to look at: