Filters can be a great addition to your Google Analytics accounts and profiles. They allow you to exclude or include certain data so that your profile reports are more accurate. They also help decrease the amount of data sifting that you would need to do after your reports were already produced.

For example, maybe you want to filter out internal traffic or maybe you want to only see traffic to specific subdirectories on your site in individual profiles. Filters can make this easy.

To set up a filter in Google Analytics, you first need to go into your account and edit the profile settings for the profile you are looking to filter. Remember to always leave a backup profile that remains unaltered, since you cannot recover data once it has been filtered. Once you are in profile settings you will see "Main Profile Website information"," Goals" and below your goals you will see an area that says "Filters Applied to Profile." Click on "+ Add Filter", you will now see the "Create a New Filter" screen.


Here you can choose whether you want to add a new filter to your profile or whether you want to add an existing filter to your profile. The "Apply Existing Filter to Profile" option allows you to add the same filter across profiles. For example, you may want to filter out your internal traffic on all of your profiles, so only relevant traffic shows up in your reports.

You also have the option to add a new filter to the profile in which you will create this new filter. You will want to name your filter something descriptive so you know what it is, like "only traffic from subdirectory A" or "excluding internal traffic". You will then specify whether you want to use a predefined filter or a custom filter (we will touch on custom filters in a future post). Predefined filters give you the option to include or exclude traffic from specific domains, traffic from IP addresses and traffic to specific subdirectories. You will then choose whether you want the data you filter to be equal to, to begin with, to end with, or to contain the domain or IP address that you enter. Then you have to fill in the domain, subdirectory or IP addresses that you want to include or exclude traffic to or from.

These options allow you to be flexible with how you include or exclude data. For example, if you want to include traffic to a specific subdirectory, but it has a dynamic URL for a sub directory, "/mydir/", you can choose the option "that begins with" and it will include all traffic where the URL begins with "/mydir/" any visit where the URI begins with "/mydir/" will be included or excluded from your traffic reports. So visits to "/mydir/31", "mydir/221", "/mydir/3984" and so on, would all be included in your traffic data.


Using filters is a great way to get more specific data, which in turn can lead to better data for decision making. Filters can be simple to use and they offer many options for how you want to see your data.

Labels: Google Analytics