Advanced Segments - Segment By "Time of First Visit"

[CK]

Can you segment data based on the time of the visitor's first visit?
It would be great to be able to see how a group of visitors behaves
that joined between 3 and 4 months ago and compare it to visitors that
joined 1 month ago (that would give a lot of insight on site affinity,
retention, etc).

A somewhat inconvenient work-around (since it completely takes-over
the user-defined variable) would be to set the user-defined variable
to the date of the visitors first visit. Then I could create an
advanced segment based on that user-defined data point: select
visitors where user-defined variable > 60 days.

Are there better ways to do this that I am missing? It would be a
great feature to implement in the future for segmented data if not.

Many thanks for your advice / response!

[Nick]

Hi,

Currently supporting segmentation through the API is an open feature
request.

But through the UI, we do expose a days to transaction dimension. You
could also user the user-defined value or even an event to capture the
date of when the person joined. The tricky part of all these methods
is that GA treats dimensions as strings. So you'll have to build some
sort of reg ex to match the greater than 60 as a number.

-Nick

[CK]

Nick--many thanks! The event is exactly what I should do--I'll just
fire it whenever the GA cookie doesn't exist for that browser.