RSS7 Google Analytics Filters To Help Understand Your Visitors
September 15th, 2008 by Kyle James 
Google Analytics is a wonderful free service for tracking visitors to your website. A large website often has the challenges of multiple audiences, multiple site editors, and many stakeholders. A college website is one that definitely falls into this category. It can be a little overwhelming to dig into the data to find specific information that you want or what a certain stakeholder might be interested. One of the most important ways to not only keep your data clean and organized, but to assist in drilling down into relevant information is by applying filters to your data.
Remember Google Analytics provides you with up to 100 unique profiles in an account so there is no need to apply every filter to one profile or would you ever always want to. Segmenting data for different segments and applying specific filters to these profiles can be a major assistance in better understanding the actions of your site visitors.
So let’s look at some filters, but before we do this it’s important to remember that applying a filter to a profile only works with data going forward and will not fix data already recorded. Although there are literally countless possible filter ideas here are seven with real and practical uses.
1. All Lowercase Filter
What is wrong with this example?
It looks like all four examples point to the same page, but that really makes understanding your data very difficult. Besides handing canonical domain issues there is also issues with capital letters being mixed in with the lowercase.
The all lowercase filter does exactly what it says. This is one filter that should always be applied to every profile and almost makes you wonder why it isn’t including in the system by default.
2. Sub-Domain Traffic Filter
In order for this filter to work in the first place you need to make sure that you are including sub domain traffic in your analytics in the first place. In order to do this there is an additional line to add to your analytics code when you install it.
So once you have that in place you can setup a profile that pull specific subdomain traffic only. Also keep in mind that if you add this extra line you need to make sure that you add the next filter to your main profile.
3. Include All Domain Traffic Filter
As I mentioned in the previous filter this filter becomes important when you add the SetDomainName tracking. Because with the last filter you can filter out a certain subdomain traffic this allows you to pull all the subdomains and your main domain traffic into one gigantic profile.
4. Exclude IP Traffic Filter
Excluding a specific IP Address from your profile can be valuable to make sure that your main editor isn’t destroying your data because they are all over your site editing content. Also as this screenshot shows I use it for a little broader purpose to dismiss all oncampus traffic and look at specifically offcampus traffic. This Google Analytics Help Center will help you create the regular expression code to exclude traffic from a range of IP addresses.
5. Directory Filter
Setting up profiles to analyze and manage specific directories can be a lifesaver. It also allows you to give smaller segments of the data to specific stakeholders with access to just data that they care about without the rest of the irrelevant information. You have 100 profiles available how many directories do you have of important segments that valuable information?
6. Country/Region/City Filter
You may want to filter a profile by the visitor country or even city. You pull the values for this filter from your analytics report. As shown in the example to the left you simply dig into a demographic report and segment it as you choose and the values given are what you would use to filter. Knowing this helps you get the filter right the first time. This could be used for all sorts of filtering. Maybe you want to setup a profile that looks at your effort it a specific city. Say if you’re a community college then maybe you only care about local traffic. Maybe you are targeting a specific country where you have a sizable audience? Or maybe you just know that International traffic is meaningless to you and you just want to filter it out all together?
7. Full Referral URL Filter
This little filter is good if you want more information about the exact URL that is sending traffic to your site instead of basic site information. The results are displayed in the User Defined Section under Visits. Now it’s true that you can drill down from the site referral tab to get the exact URL, but this isn’t always as easy and clean as it should be. Having an alternative to display this data in a profile can provide you with some additional actionable data.
Conclusion
What is important to remember with all filters is that you can mix and match them together on a profile. It’s as easy as setting up a new profile in Google Analytics and applying one or more filter to begin collecting data in a unique and valuable way to help direct your web development and design decisions. As always you have to define your own goals and establish what you want to accomplish before any of these filters can help you collect the data that is most meaningful to you.
Posted in Analytics, Tutorial, Webmaster Tools | 
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September 16th, 2008 at 10:16 am
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September 16th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Great post. Thanks for the tips.
September 16th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Thanks for the help, Kyle.
September 21st, 2008 at 3:06 am
Thankx for this filters!
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:23 am
Hello,
These are great filters. Do you know if there is also a filter with which i can create a profile with only the people who have achieved goal 1?
September 24th, 2008 at 3:38 am
Great post! Filters are truly timesavers if you use them in the right way.
September 25th, 2008 at 3:01 am
nice. really, i don’t feel i get that much use out of analytics. so maybe i’ll one or two of these.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:42 pm
[...] you can’t manage it. Right Right. Of course. But I’m amazed and perplexed at how INDEPTH some of your reccomendations and techniques go. It must be nice to have that kind of time on your [...]
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:50 am
Hi Kyle,
I have added some of these filters to http://www.googleanalyticsfilters.com with reference back to you and your website. I hope this is OK. If not, please let me know.
http://www.googleanalyticsfilters.com is an attempt to create a central directory of user-submitted Google Analytics Filters.
Cheers,
Ken
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:07 am
Ken,
That’s an awesome resource! Thanks for sharing. I’ll add a link to it in my links of the week post tomorrow to help get the word out.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:09 am
To help tracking big websites javascript event listener can be used.
have a look here:http://www.iqcontent.com/blog/2006/11/tracking-document-downloads-in-google-analytics/
I have a question how can i EXCLUDE a particular directory from being tracked?
I just did a custom exclude filter and used:
^/excludeme/
It is difficult to test because historical data is included.
Do you think that it will work?
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
@andrew - I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. Make sure you setup a new profile before applying the filter to your main data. Also if you have multiple filters the order that you have the filters in does matter so you might have to set it and check it again the next day, then change it and look the next day.
October 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 am
Thank you For your reply and i will test it.
I am not sure what Field should i do the filter on. There is no subfolder option and i dont think hostname will work:http://i38.tinypic.com/30clwl2.png
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Thank you for the post. I was already using some of these filters, but it was nice to learn about some others.
I have a comment and a question:
Comment:
Your statement about the lowercase filter:
“This is one filter that should always be applied to every profile and almost makes you wonder why it isn’t including in the system by default.”
My response:
I would guess that there are three reasons this filter isn’t applied by default.
The first is that that would not be very analytical.
The second reason would be that it can actually be helpful to see that information separated like that. Let’s say you know of an old link that leads to a page using a specific mix of upper and lowercase letters; or that you put out a publication listing the address with a specific mix of upper and lowercase letters. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to track that information separately?
Thirdly, and probably the most prevalent reason behind the choice, is that the majority of the world is still using *nix-based servers where “Index.htm” is a completely different file than “index.htm”. On a *nix-based server, it would make absolutely no sense to convert all of your URLs to lowercase, because then they would not actually lead to the correct pages (unless you happen to ensure that every single file on your Web site uses only lowercase letters in its filenames and file extensions).
Now, onto my question:
Regarding the IP filter; do you know if there’s any way to still track traffic from all IP addresses, but filter it out selectively while viewing or exporting your reports?
Every computer on our school’s network (with the exception of a handful of IT folks and personal users) reports the same IP address, so I would be curious to see how much of our traffic is being generated here on campus; but would not want to permanently exclude that information (after all, that would effectively exclude all of our students that are using the computer labs, library computers, etc. to visit our Web site).
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
@OtherWebGuy - I stand corrected. Those are some very valid points about the all lowercase filter. I guess I just track things differently and like to keep my data standardized, but I can completely see where your coming from and why that is helpful.
As far as the Off Campus filter. That’s why you setup multiple profiles. Google Analytics gives you 100 profiles in an account so you can setup a profile to track off campus visits while having another that tracks all visits. You can also have another profile that tracks offcampus visits to a certain subdirectory profile. Check out this post for more information about profiles. http://doteduguru.com/id132-google-analytics-basic-tips.html
I believe I have 22 profiles setup tracking different things on our main website. I have a whole lot of profiles that just track a subdirectory traffic say just wofford.edu/admission traffic or just wofford.edu/alumni traffic. It’s easier to break it down this way. You can also combine filters for specific segments. Say only offcampus traffic from your local city to admission. So that’s a City, IP, and Directory filter all applied to that one profile.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Sorry to bother you again… i feel so stupid a simple exclude folder should be so easy to do but i already tried this:
xxx\.xx\.xx\.xx/hlive5/
(Exclude all traffic from domain IP address being the .com domain for the main site)
and this as well:
http://i38.tinypic.com/30clwl2.png
it obviously should be a custom exclude filter but what do i choose in the “Filter field”??
Thank you in advance Kyle