It’s really surprising that google analytics is absolutely free. With the number of features it provides, it has become a key tool for a web analytics agency. One such feature which agencies regularly use is the Google Analytic filters.
Google Analytics view filters offer different ways to look at the website or application traffic data, which helps online business owners and marketers to better understand how to attract, retain, and convert more users or customers.
A filter can permanently change the view of your data.
Once, you filter the data there is no way you can undo it so it is very important to test your filters before you apply it on the data.
To do the testing Google Analytics provides a built-in verification tool to test the filter which you can access while creating and editing it.
Before getting down to the business of creating and using views, you should remember
- Views are not retroactive. Google Analytics tracks data for a particular view from the moment it is created and doesn’t include historical data from other views.
- Always keep the raw data. Filters sometimes have unexpected errors, so always keep at least one clean view that has the raw data Google Analytics collected.
- Test before implementing. Ensure that the filter is working as expected before adding it to an important view. Although a filter can be removed, its impact cannot be reversed.
Here are the most important filters you should consider adding to your reporting views inside Google Analytics:
1. Exclude internal traffic
The exclude external traffic filter gives you the liberty to exclude yourself, i.e. your company’s internal visits, from the main view.
You may also exclude the traffic from all third-party companies or agencies that you are working with. Multiple IP addresses can also be excluded using this filter.
This filter ensures that whatever hits are received are coming from unique users.
So track and note down all the internal IPs and follow the steps shown in the image to exclude them.
2. Search & Replace
The Search and replace filter in Google Analytics looks for information and modifies it before it gets recorded in the aggregated tables.
Consider two site pages that can be accessed with or without www.
In the report, Google Analytics would create two rows to include both cases for each page.
To avoid this, and to integrate the pageviews, create the following search and replace filter.
This filter would look for ‘AnalyticsABC.com’ as the hostname and replace it with ‘www.AnalyticsABC.com’.
3. Include Specific Hostname
Hostname is the domain of the page a visitor is on when he sends a hit to Google Analytics.
This filter is especially useful for implementing cross-domain tracking. It filters out data based on the hostname of the hits and records the data in their corresponding views.
4. Include Specific Subdomain
Same as the hostname filter, just change the filter pattern to match the subdomain.
If you want to add a filter to the ‘About page’, to include the traffic from the about page on AnalyticsABC.com then follow this-
Filter Name: Include about.AnalyticsABC.com Only
Filter Type: Custom > Include
Filter Field: Hostname
Filter Pattern: ^about\.AnalyticsABC\.com$
5. Filter on the Geography
Google Analytics allows Marketers to segment the traffic based on location.
For most websites, 2-3 countries contribute towards most of the revenue.
Using the filter view, you can consolidate the countries of a sales region into its respective region name. In this way, you can track data from a region that is spread across multiple countries.
Filter Type: Custom filter > Include
Filter Field: Country
Filter Pattern: Country 1 | Country 2
The smaller regions can also be tracked on in this filter by replacing the countries’ name with region name.
6. Lowercase Campaign Tags
Marketing teams use tools such as URL builder to generate a campaign URL.
However, two same campaign names can be named with different letter case to make Google Analytics record the data for each campaign separately.
To make your campaign names consistent, create the following filter:
Filter Name: Lowercase Campaign Name
Filter Type: Custom > Lowercase
Filter Field: Campaign Name
7. Filter Domain Referrals
This filter excludes traffic referred from selected domains.
Excluding referrers in this way, prevents all hits originating from those excluded websites from being part of your Analytics traffic.
It works by comparing the filter pattern you provide with the hit values found in the Campaign Source dimension.
Filter Type: Custom
Filter Type: drop-down menu & select Exclude
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: domain of the referring source which you want to exclude.
8. Include a Device Category
With this filter, you can get a view of all the devices the users are using to browse your site.
With this filter, you can get insights into everything about the device like its features, model number, keyboard type, Cellular Radio, Wifi Support, NFC Support, and Marketing Name.
With this data you can effectively segment and target the potential audience.
Example- Add this following filter to the view that only contains traffic from mobile devices.
Filter Name: Include Mobile Only
Filter Type: Custom > Include
Filter Field: Device Category
Filter Pattern: Mobile
Conclusion
We have seen how powerful the filters are and how they modify data in your reports. Just remember, filters will permanently modify your data, so before applying new filters, test them first.
There are more advanced filters that you could use.
