Filter controls give people viewing your report a way
to refine the data that appears in your charts.
This makes your reports interactive and lets your audience focus on the data that's important to them.
Filter controls use the values in a dimension to display a list of checkboxes.
Viewers of your report can constrain the data shown by your charts by checking or unchecking
these dimension values.
Let's say you want to create a report for your mobile marketing team,
and you'd like to give them a way to tailor it to just the mobile devices they're interested
in seeing in the report.
You can do this easily by using a filter control.
Let's look at a before and after example.
This simple Google Analytics report has a scorecard showing the percentage of new sessions,
and a table showing the sources of those sessions.
Here's the same report, but we've added a filter control
based on the Mobile Device Model Dimension.
Notice the filter shows one checkbox for each mobile device contained in this dimension.
Watch what happens when the (not set) option is unchecked.
Unchecking the "not set" option updates both the table and the scorecard, so that they
no longer aggregate any data that comes from records where the mobile device model was
"(not set)".
To quickly select just one of the filter values, hover over that filter and click ONLY.
For example, selecting only iPhone shows the new sessions percentage and traffic sources
that came from generic iPhone users.
That's how filter controls work in view mode.
Now let's add a filter control to a report.
First, switch to edit mode.
Then Click the filter control icon...and Draw the filter control where you want
it to appear.
The Filter control properties panel appears over here on the right.
This is where you configure the control.
Notice that the filter control has a default dimension set already.
To change the dimension to Mobile Device Model, click the current dimension and use the Dimension Picker.
The fastest way to find a dimension is to use search.
Once you've found the dimension, click to select it.
Then click the Back arrow to return to the properties panel.
You can skip the metric and order options for now.
The default values are fine.
These are explained in detail in the Help Center.
If you're filtering on a large dimension, it's useful to be able to show only the most
significant values.
For example, your viewers may not care about some of the lesser used mobile devices, so
you can limit the list to, say, the top 10 kinds.
To add a little style the filter control, use the STYLE tab.
Let's add a gray border around the control, so it looks like the other components.
Ok!
You're almost done!
Another useful feature of filter controls is to limit the scope of the filter.
A filter's scope determines which charts it applies to.
By default, filter controls are "page-level scope" components, meaning they affect all
the charts on that page.
But if you group a filter control with one or more charts, then the filter only applies
to the charts in that group.
Group the filter and the table first by selecting them both, then choosing Group from the the
Arrange menu.
You can also do this by right-clicking and selecting Group.
To view the report, click Edit
Select only iPhone again.
See how, only the table updates and the scorecard stays the same?
That's because the filter and table are grouped.
Filter controls are a great way to make your reports interactive and relevant to your audience.
Learn more about the advanced features of filter controls in the Data Studio 360 Help Center.