Filters can help refine your data and make it more readable in your reports. For example,
you can use a filter to track activity in a specific website directory or track subdomains
of your website in separate views. There are two kinds of filters: “predefined”
and “ custom” filters.
Predefined filters have already been created for you in Google Analytics, you just have
to select the filter you wish to use. These allow you to include or exclude data based
on traffic from the ISP domain, IP addresses, subdirectories, or the hostname, and designate
how the filter will match that information.
Custom filters let you include or exclude hits from your data collection, format data
to lowercase or uppercase, search and replace data collected in the hit. Custom filters
accomplish this by matching a particular filter text-pattern that you identify.
For example, let’s say your business was making a push into mobile and only wanted
to analyze mobile traffic in a specific view. You can set up a custom “include-only”
filter on the view for Device Category and specify a value of “Mobile.” The filter
will look at the criteria specified and match it to any relevant hits that Google Analytics
has collected for that view. If the filter can’t match the criteria, the filter will
not be applied to that data.
Similarly, you may want to show only data for a specific campaign in a view. You can
set up a custom filter to include only campaign data with the campaign name or type parameter
you specified. Using view permissions, you can then share this campaign data with partners
that you designate.
If there was data you wanted to specifically exclude such as Paid Search (or CPC) traffic,
you can set a custom “exclude” filter that will exclude all paid traffic in a particular
view, as well.
You can also use filters to normalize the data in your reports to make them easier to
use. Google Analytics data isn't case sensitive, so pages in the All Pages report may show
the same URL multiple times.
You can quickly combine rows that differ only by case, by using a Lowercase or Uppercase
filter. These filters will force the case to all lowercase or all uppercase, thus eliminating
duplicate data.
This will consolidate that page reporting and make the data in those reports a little neater.
In addition to include, exclude, and lowercase
filters, there are other advanced filters that allow you to remove, replace, and combine
filter fields in more complex ways using what are called “regular expressions.” Regular
expressions (or “reg ex” for short) are characters that you can use to identify matching
text in order to trigger an action. A basic regular expression on a filter can be something
as simple as a word or a more complicated combination of characters.
Let’s say the Google Merchandise Store wants to set up a view with a filter to see all
the keywords users searched for on their website for Android dolls. Because users might search
for variations like “Android plush doll,” or “Android stuffed doll,” we can create
a regular expression that identifies each of these variations.
We can add an advanced filter with a regular expression that recognizes any Site Search
queries that contain the terms “android” and “doll.” This is just a basic example,
but you can use regex to find much more sophisticated strings to apply your filters.
For example, if you have technical query parameters passed in the URL of your website, you might
have identical pages with different addresses.
Because the URL is different, this page will show up multiple times in your reports. But
since they’re the same page, it may make sense to filter out the query parameters,
so that it doesn’t appear multiple times in a report.
You can include a regular expression that recognizes the main part of the URL before
the query parameter, puts it in a variable, and overwrites the entire URL with that variable.
This renders these page URLs identical in reporting.
For businesses that collect data from multiple domains, it can be hard to distinguish page
names in Google Analytics. In the “All Pages” report, “googlestoreamerica/index.axd”
and “googlestoreeurope/index.axd” will both show up as “index.axd.”
You can use a regular expression to add the hostname in Analytics so that you can distinguish
between multiple domains. To learn more about regular expressions, please visit the resources
at the end of the lesson. Remember that filters, like all configuration
settings, are not applied retroactively to your data. They are only applied from the
moment you create them and can take up to 24 hours before being applied to your data.
Also, don’t forget that the order in which you apply the filters is very important. Each
filter passes filtered data to the next filter in the sequence, so you’ll want to be thoughtful
about the order in which you apply your filters.
You can adjust the order of your filters by going into “Admin” and selecting “Filters”.
Then select “Assign Filter Order.”
Note that you can use filters across multiple views, but be careful. If you edit the filter,
those changes will be applied across all the different views to which you’ve applied
that filter.
Once you have set up your configuration, Google Analytics processes the data by checking each
hit against your filters. If a hit matches the logic in a filter, then that filter will
be applied.
Remember to test out your filters in a “test” view before you apply them to the “master” view.
Also, be sure to test out your filters on real-time reports to make sure they’re
working because they may take several hours to filter all of your data.