White paper

6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters
Author: Jason Cartwright,
Head of Digital Marketing

Published: July 2012

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White paper
6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for

marketers and webmasters but unless
you are a bit of whizz, you might find it
difficult to drill down and find relevant
information.

This whitepaper covers a few tips and

tricks regarding the use of filters that
will help you get more from Google
Analytics and aid you in making more
informed decisions about your site and
its content.
The key benefit to any organisation is that Google Analytics filters
provide a flexible way of defining what data is included or excluded in
a report and how it appears, allowing you to manage and segment the
incoming data for increased insight.

This whitepaper contains 6 key filters that an organisation should

consider implementing:

Setting your URLs to Lowercase

If the URLs for your website allow upper and lowercase characters,
Google will report on each version of a URL separately. Imagine the pain
if you had 100s, 1000s or more pages on your website with multiple
line entries for the same URL in your reports. This filter will save time by
ensuring all the multiple line entries of a single URL are treated as the
same page.

Excluding your own traffic from reports

Chances are that your own visits to your own web site are not going to
be a large percentage of the total visits and page views. Nonetheless,
you can still permanently remove your own traffic and that of the
agencies you might be working with from appearing in your Google
Analytics statistics

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White paper
6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

Showing the domain / hostname

If you want to see the domain / hostname appended to page names
within your reports, this filter will include it for you. If you are using
Google Analytics across multiple domains, this can also help to identify
which domains the Account ID is running on.

Filtering directories and sub-directories

This filter is useful to either report on stats for a specific directory
e.g. /blog/ or exclude a directory from the report. There are many
scenarios where this can be beneficial, particularly if you want to
separate out e.g. blog or newsfeed traffic from the rest of the traffic
to your site.

Separating mobile and non-mobile traffic

Mobile traffic is on the increase and mobile users will interact with your
site differently to desktop users. This filter separates out the audiences
so you can make more informed decisions towards each.

Making sense of the search keyword (Not Provided)

If you’ve looked at the organic search phrase report, the chances are
that one of the top keywords appearing reads as (not provided). This
filter breaks down the (not provided) keyword by including the stats
for the associated landing pages. This will give you an idea of what
keywords are likely being classified under (not provided).

BONUS - See search rankings for keywords in Google

Have you ever wanted to see what the ranking of a keyword was in
Google and how much traffic it drives in that position? Using this
bonus filter you can.

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White paper
6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

Before you start

Warning: Filters are applied to the information coming into your

account, to manipulate the final data in order to provide specialized
reports (as each filter alters the original data). Because of this, Netcel
always advises that you have a ‘Master Profile’ that has no filters
applied to it so the raw data is always available and a test profile for
experimenting with before applying to the actual profile you want to
use.

To set up filters within Google Analytics, firstly you will need

‘Administrator’ access to the account. Once you have this, go to the
Admin section and select the ‘Filters’ tab. From here you can create a
new filter, see existing filters and assign a filter order to a particular
Google Analytics Profile:

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White paper
6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

1. Setting your URLs to Lowercase

If your website allows URLs to appear in the address bar using a

combination of upper and lowercase characters then Google Analytics
will report each URL version as a unique entry.

There is value in seeing this information; however there are many

instances where it is useful to merge this data together into a single
entry relating to the page. In order to do this, you need to create a
‘Lowercase’ filter.

Filter Purpose: To ensure URL’s and pages that can be visited / accessed
using both uppercase and lowercase characters are reported as the same
page. For example:

www.domain.com/Partners/
www.domain.com/partners/

The following shows the settings to enter to create the filter.

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White paper
6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

2. Excluding your own traffic from reports – IP Filtering

After installing Google Analytics, many people forget to block out their own
visitor traffic and those of other agencies they might work with. If this isn’t
done, it could potentially skew the results with your or their actions on the
site.

To filter out either your company or another company, you will need to find
out the IP address. You can check with our IT team what your specific IP
number(s) your organisation might be using, however if you are based in one
location, you can visit http://www.whatismyip.com and find out.

Once you have an IP Address, go to the Filters tab and use the settings
below to enter it. In the following example I used 74.125.19.103.

If you need to exclude a range of IP addresses, you can use Google’s IP

Address Range Tool to enter the first and last IP address in the range, and it
will generate the expression you will need to use in your exclusion filter.

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6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

You can learn more about excluding internal traffic filters by IP in

Google Analytics Help.

3. Showing the domain / hostname

There are instances when you use the same Google Analytics account
profile across multiple domains and sub-domains. In these instances, it can
be beneficial to be able to see the hostname to distinguish between sites
within your reports. By default, Google doesn’t show this information and
as a result your content page reports will only show the folders / page
names after the domain name:

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6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

Applying the following filter will include the hostname into the reports.

NB: Please note that filters cannot be applied to historical / pre-existing

data. Consequently, the full URL will only be shown from the point in time
that the filter is applied.

After applying this filter, your content reports will show the full URL
of the page:

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6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

4. Filtering directories and sub-directories

Creating additional profiles with filtered sub-directories allows you

to isolate and understand what is occurring within key areas of your
site. A few uses where this could help include:

• Country Specific folders – For example, if you have an

international site where all of a countries content resides in a
specific sub folder e.g. /de-de/ for a German site.
• Blogs and News – If your main site also hosts a blog or News
section that updates frequently, you might find your stats for
these sections are ‘drowning out’ the results for other parts of
your site e.g. service and product areas.
• Campaign Microsites – If you’ve setup an event or campaign
microsite that is hosted on the same domain as your main site,
you can create a filter to report only on traffic for it.

There are several options available for filtering a sub-directory

however the following shows an example configuration:

In this instance, when the filter is applied, the stats will only relate to
pages where the URL begins with /folder-name/ e.g. http://www.
domain.com/folder-name/

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White paper
6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

5. Separating mobile and non-mobile traffic

Mobile and non-mobile visitors will interact with your site in different
ways. From a marketing perspective, rather than combining all of
your visitor information, you can create filters to separate them
out. The following filter settings show how to create a filter for only
including mobile traffic to a site:

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6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

6. Making sense of the search keyword (Not Provided)

Since Google started rolling out its SSL encryption for search queries
of logged-in users, a lot of valuable data has gone missing in Google
analytics. Within the Google Analytics organic keyword report you
will find reference to the query (not provided)

Unfortunately there is no way at present to see what the actual

keywords are that have been bundled into (not provided). The
following filter however will append the landing page to the keyword
for all (not provided) visits. Based on the landing page content, it
could give an idea as to the types of phrases that are being included.

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6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

So to summarise, this filter will tell Google Analytics:

• Whenever you see a search term that matches ‘<any

character>not provided<any character>’, apply this filter”.

• “Within this filter, we also want to use the address of the page
reached where ‘(not provided)’ was the referring search term”.

• “When you apply this filter, discard the original ‘(not provided)’
search term, and replace it with ‘np -’ followed by the landing
page address”.

Bonus Filter
See search rankings for keywords in Google Analytics

Have you ever wanted to see what the ranking of a keyword was and
how much traffic it drives in that position? How is this helpful? With
this data you can:

• Analyse the keywords that drive conversions to your site and

see how well they rank on the search results.

• Analyse over time how different positions on the search results

will affect your traffic/conversions. It is pretty normal for
organic rankings to fluctuate slightly. So assume that you’re
normally #X for certain keywords, analyse how a drop or an
increase in organic rankings affect your traffic/conversions.

• Analyse over time your portfolio of keywords. How many

keywords are on the first page? Your aim is to get your
percentage of keywords on the first page as close to 100% as
possible.

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White paper
6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

*Bryan Casson on YouMoz detailed a fairly advanced filtering setup

and segmentation to achieve this. The instructions are as follows:

Step 1 – Creation of the Filters

Filter 1 - (Extracting the data)

This filter will extract the ranking data from the (cd) parameter and
hold it in ‘custom field 1’

*http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/366929

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6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

Filter 2: (Displaying the data)

This filter will extract the data from custom field 1 and show the
results under the “Traffic Sources > Search > Organic” section in Google
Analytics.

Step 2 – Filter Order

Assign the filters in the correct order so Filter 1 appears before Filter 2:

Once applied, you will start to see numbers next to your keywords
which shows their organic position (including universal results)

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6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

Step 3 – Data Segmenting

This isn’t necessary but you might want to setup advanced segments
to show results only for keywords in certain positions e.g. Top 1, Top
5, Top 10, etc.

Segment 1 (Position Top 1 Segment): Create a new segment under

Advanced Segments > +New Custom Segment and call the number
position you wish to segment:

Segment 2 (Position Top 5 Segment): Create a new segment under

Advanced Segments > +New Custom Segment and use the “or”
statement to add numbers 1-5:

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6 Must Have
Google Analytics Filters

Segment3 (Position Top 10 Segment):

Create a new segment under Advanced Segments > +New Custom
Segment and use the “or” statement to add numbers 1-10.

You can repeat this to get Top 50 or Top 100; you will just have to
add more “or” statements.

Summary

There are many combinations of filters that can be setup to help you
interpret your Google Analytics data. Hopefully the few outlined in
this whitepaper will give you a good idea of the benefits of using
filters allowing you to take a closer look at your data and make more
informed decisions regarding visitor behaviour, content and budgets
for marketing.

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About the Author

Jason Cartwright is a qualified Google Analytics professional and has worked

within digital marketing since 2000. Employed at Netcel, an independent full
service digital agency, Jason heads up Netcel’s digital marketing team, providing
a range of services including SEO, PPC, Social Media and Analytics consultancy.

Netcel Ltd
45 Grosvenor Road
St Albans, Hertfordshire
AL1 3AW

t 01727 736020
f 01727 736030
e info@netcel.com
w www.netcel.com

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