Segments

A Segment is a group of end users, or of accounts, that ARCY found rather than one you defined. You will find the section directly under the table on Users and on Organizations.

Each Segment is a card whose title is a plain sentence, for example:

Fills the same field again and again on Checkout, then leaves. 214 members, up 31 since last week.

Click it and you get the whole finding: why these people are in it, three sessions that show it, everybody in it, and a block you can paste into a ticket.

Where a Segment comes from

Once a week, ARCY looks at what everybody in the environment did and finds combinations of behavior that travel together far more often than chance would produce. It counts them first, then writes one sentence for each group worth showing you.

The counting is done by the database and the sentence is written by the model, and those two jobs never swap. The model never produces a number. Every figure you see on a Segment came from a query, which is why you can repeat it in a meeting.

What is stored is a rule, not a list of people

A Segment holds the rule that defines it, and who is in it is worked out from that rule every night. Two things follow, and both matter more than they sound:

• You can always ask why somebody is in it. The rule is a short list of things a person can read, and everybody in the group matches all of them.
• Nobody drops out of a group without something happening. Membership follows behavior, not a snapshot somebody took once.

The name never changes

A Segment's name and its rule are written once, when it is created, and never rewritten. If a later weekly run finds the same pattern again, it is the same Segment, with the same sentence and the same link. A screenshot you pasted last month still matches the page.

If a pattern stops standing out, the Segment goes quiet: it is marked and dated, and it stays where it is. A Segment that vanished would be impossible to tell apart from something broken.

Two clocks

• Weekly, ARCY looks for new Segments. Only this creates one.
• Nightly, ARCY recounts every Segment. This never renames anything.

Each card says which day its count is from, so you never have to guess how fresh a number is.

What ARCY needs before you see anything

The bars are deliberately high, because a group that turns out to be noise is worse than no group at all. A Segment is a sentence somebody repeats out loud.

• 200 tracked people in the environment over the last 30 days before ARCY looks at all.
• 20 members minimum for a group to exist.
• The behavior must be at least twice as common inside the group as chance predicts.
• At most six Segments render, so the section stays a short list of things worth doing something about.

A new or small product will see an empty section for a few weeks. The section tells you how many tracked people you have and how many it needs, so you can see the gap closing.

Environments and live traffic

Segments belong to one environment, and they are built from live sessions only. Your own testing never produces a Segment and never counts toward one. Switch environments in the sidebar and you see that environment's own Segments.

Organization Segments are about spread, not totals

An Organization Segment groups accounts on how use is spread across the people inside them: whether nearly all the use belongs to one person, whether most of the account never showed up, whether nobody new arrived, whether every newly arrived person hit the same wall, whether there is plenty of looking and nothing submitted.

That is deliberately different from "some of this account's people are in a user Segment". On a real account somebody matches every pattern, so that version would put almost every account in almost every group and tell you nothing.

What you can do with one

• Open the people and the evidence. Three sessions ARCY picked, and they are the same three for everybody, so a colleague following your link sees exactly what you saw.
• Copy a problem statement. The sentence, the exact element by its label and its page, the count, and links to the evidence, ready to paste into a tracker.
• Get told when it grows. Turn on the Segment alerts under Alerts, and set how much growth is worth an email. There is a floor and a cooldown, so a Segment that grows every night is one message, not one a night.
• Hear when an account joins one. Useful before a renewal call rather than after it.

What a Segment never does

• It never speaks to your end users. Nothing about a Segment makes ARCY open the widget or start a conversation on its own.
• It never claims a cause. If a Segment shrinks after your release, that is the count moving. ARCY reports the change and does not tell you what caused it.
• It is never renamed under you.