Segments in Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics
Segments isolate the subset of data that matches a set of conditions, and both Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics now call them segments - CJA used the name filters until April 2025, when Adobe brought the terminology back into line. The names match again; the data models underneath still do not. The names match again; the data models underneath still do not.
The container logic maps cleanly in concept: Adobe Analytics thinks in visitor, visit, and hit; CJA thinks in person, session, and event. The renaming is honest rather than cosmetic, because the person container can span every channel in the connection - a visitor who called support and then bought in-store is still one person to a CJA segment. In migration work the segment inventory is where business logic hides: definitions accumulate for years, many are abandoned, many are duplicated under different names, and some quietly encode how the company defines a customer. Migration is the review most analytics teams never schedule.
What Adobe migrates for you - and what it does not
Adobe's Component Migration tool (Analytics > Admin > Component migration) recreates segments, calculated metrics, date ranges, and entire projects in Customer Journey Analytics, against a dimension and metric mapping you confirm first. What it does not carry over matters as much as what it does: attribution settings, tags, sharing, descriptions, curation, and schedules stay behind, and several panel types must be removed before a project will migrate at all. Treat the tool as a head start on the inventory, not as a finished migration - every migrated segment still needs its numbers validated against the new data model before anyone trusts it.
Creating segments, side by side
In Adobe Analytics: Components > Segments > Create, choose the container (visitor, visit, or hit), add conditions, validate against traffic before sharing. In Customer Journey Analytics the same workflow lives under Components > Segments with person, session, and event containers, plus one nuance worth learning early: because data views already control persistence and attribution, some segments that existed to patch collection-time limitations simply stop being necessary.
FAQ
Do Adobe Analytics segments transfer to Customer Journey Analytics?
Partly. Adobe's Component Migration tool recreates Adobe Analytics segments, calculated metrics, date ranges, and projects in Customer Journey Analytics once you confirm a dimension and metric mapping. What it does not carry over matters as much as what it does: attribution settings, tags, sharing, descriptions, curation, and schedules stay behind, and several panel types have to be removed before a project will migrate at all. Treat the tool as a head start on the inventory, not as a finished migration.
Why did CJA rename filters to segments?
Adobe aligned Customer Journey Analytics with Adobe Analytics terminology in April 2025: what CJA called filters are now called segments in the product. Older documentation, tutorials, and saved links still say filters - they describe the same component.
What is the CJA equivalent of the visit container?
The session container. Person replaces visitor, session replaces visit, and event replaces hit - with the practical difference that sessions in CJA are defined per data view and can be changed retroactively, rather than fixed at collection time.
Why do migrated segments return different numbers than the originals?
Because the underlying model changed: identity stitching may join what were separate visitors, session rules may differ from the old visit definition, and cross-channel data widens the population. A delta is not automatically an error - but every delta needs an explanation before the segment is trusted.