Concepts
Segments
A segment is a question about your users that Loop keeps asking. One definition, read by analytics, messages, guides and experiments alike, so the audience you explain a drop with is the audience you fix it for.
A segment is a question, not a list
This area has no published API yet.
Segments, analytics, experiments, messages, imports and retention are reached through the console's own API, which exists to serve one first-party client and changes whenever that client does. Rather than print a shape we would have to break, this page describes what is structurally true. The public reference lands when the interface is stable enough to promise.
A segment stores a definition, never a set of people. Every read re-evaluates it, so the membership on Tuesday is not the membership on Monday, and nobody has to remember to refresh anything.
It will change under you, and that is the feature.
A message aimed at a segment reaches whoever matches when it sends, not whoever matched when you wrote it. If you need a frozen list, you are asking for an export, and a segment is deliberately the opposite of one.
Two dialects
| Dialect | What it asks |
|---|---|
| rules | Did these events happen, in this window, this many times? Matched all or any. |
| funnel-cohort | Who reached this step of this funnel and not the next one: the people a drop is made of. |
The rules dialect has no ordering and no negation.
It asks whether events happened, not in what order, and it cannot ask for their absence. A question like 'signed up but never connected data' is a funnel-cohort question, not a rules one.
One definition, four readers
The same segment is read by the analytics screen when you break a number down, by a message when it decides who to send to, by a guide when it decides who to show, and by an experiment when it decides who is eligible. That is the difference between a bundle of tools and one product.
- The count is live, and it is a count of people rather than events.
- A segment with no matches is a real answer, not an error; it renders as empty rather than as a failure.
- Deleting a segment does not delete the people in it. It deletes the question.
What is not built yet
There is no segment builder screen.
The funnel-cohort dialect is created from the analytics drill-through: you click into the people behind a funnel step and save them as a segment. The rules dialect exists in the data model and is reachable by the agent and the API, but there is no UI that composes one. Saying so is cheaper than letting you hunt for it.