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.
