Filters in Google analytics is one of the most powerful feature that allows for a lot of customization and manipulation of the data. Filters are applied to the data that is received in a Google Analytics account to manipulate the final data to provide more accurate information. They allow you to include, exclude, search and replace data in addition to the options for creating custom and advanced filters.

In this article we will discuss some of the Filters that you must have, if you are using Google analytics for tracking and website performance.

How to Create a Filter in Google Analytics
You can access the Filters from your Profile Settings page in Google Analytics. Just click “Add Filter” to add a new filter to a profile.

RegEx in Google Analytics
RegEx or Regular Expressions are extremely important when it comes to creating these filters. Regular expressions are special characters that match or capture portions of a field, as well as the rules that govern all characters. You can read in details about the RegEx used in Google Analytics here .

Google Analytics Filter to Exclude Internal Traffic

Every website gets a fair share of internal traffic that is visits by webmasters, marketers and other members of the team who are part of the same business. It is important to exclude this traffic from your analytics data as otherwise you would have an inflated traffic count.

Google analytics provides a predefined filter for this, after you have clicked on the “Add Filter” on Profile Settings page it would take you to the “Create New Filter” page. On that page..

1. Name for your Filter
2. Select “Predefined Filter” from the radio buttons
3. Under Filter Type, select “Exclude” in the First drop down box, “traffic from the IP addresses” in the second drop down and “that are equal to” in the third dropdown.
4. A box would appear below, where you need to put your / your client’s IP address that you want to exclude
5. Save Changes and you are done .

Filter to Exclude Multiple IP addresses or a Range of IP Address ?

This is a very likely situation when your client has multiple offices in different locations and Google Analytics provides a solution for that as well. In such cases, we will have to use a “Custom Filter”.

1. Instead of “Predefined Filter” ( as in Step (b) above ) select Custom Filter radio button.
2. A new set of options would appear, select “Exclude” radio button.
3. In Filter Field drop down select “Visitor IP Address”
4. In Filter Pattern, you will have to mention the IP addresses, or the range of IP addresses using Regular Expressions , commonly referred to as Reg Ex.
5. Example 1 – if you just need to exclude two IP addresses – 65.42.34.123 and 72.42.35.125 – your Filter Pattern would read as below
   65\.42\.34\.123$|^72\.42\.35\.125$
6. Example 2 – if you need to exclude a range of IP address – 65.42.34.1 – 65.42.34.25
   Your Filter pattern would read as below
   ^65\.42\.34\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$

Google Analytics All Lowercase Filter

This filter is effective if your URLs are available both in uppercase and lowercase format. Google analytics in such case would treat these two as two different URLs and your data for the same page would be split between the two. The all lowercase filter converts all URLs to lower case.

The picture below explains how to set it up.

Full Referral URL Filter for Google Analytics

This is a marketer’s bliss While Google analytics tells you which websites are referring traffic to you it doesn’t really show the exact complete URL that is the referral source. If you are getting tons of referrals from a huge portal, it can often become difficult to identify the complete URL of your referral source. With this filter you would be able to see the full referral URL for your site.

However, this would require you to move a step further and not just use a Custom Filter but an Advanced Custom Filter. The picture below shows how this is set up.

You would be getting the resulting data from this filter under User Defined Section in Visits.

These are just three of the common Google Analytics filter that you must apply if you are using GA. There are many more filters that can be used for various purposes and to get a lot of valuable information besides the great insight that GA provides by default.

Before we end, one word of caution. Applying filters can make dramatic changes to the data in an account because it effects the data that is collected by GA. It is advisable to create a separate profile and then apply the filters to it and observe the data in both (with and without filters) profiles for initial few days to ensure that the filters are working as intended. Also, keep in mind that applying filters would affect future data and would not have any impact on the data that is already there in your account.

In case you would have any specific question or requirement about Google Analytics implementation feel free to contact me.

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Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics Setup & Ecommerce Tracking
Measuring Impact of online marketing on offline presence
How to Improve Adwords Campaigns with Analytics

The post Google Analytics Filters That Every Website Should Have appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Now in their new experiment with the Google Search result URLs, they have done some changes which again would leave most other web analytics package high and dry to track Google referrer data.

At present a typical Google search referrer URL would look like
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=candles&btnG=Google+Search

The New Referrer URL format would be
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=candles&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Now besides showing the complete result page URL and other multiple parameters, the key difference between these two referrer strings is that in the first on the parameters started after “/search?” and in the second one they start after “/url?”. Now most of the present day analytics packages parses the Google referrer string based on the “/search?” part and looks for information after that to figure out which keyword or which page of the search result the traffic came from. Also most of them look for the “/search?” to determine if a visitor is coming from organic search results. Replacing “search” with “url” would leave them all messed up.

Google analytics however does not depend on the “/search?” string in the referrer and would continue to work properly. Also the latest version of Urchin (6.5) would not be affected by this change.

Other analytics packages would probably need to do some changes to adapt to this change in Google referrer string to provide accurate analytics report.

These new referrer String is launched at beta stage and only a small percentage of users are getting this at present but it is likely that Google would soon roll out this in the main stream.

While Google has not explained or given any reason for this sudden changes there seems to be just two possible reasons for this.
a) Making other third party analytics less usable / giving them a hard time – I don’t think other analytics providers would have a lot of problem to adapt this but they would definitely need some time and webmasters would need an option for that period and Google Analytics would be the choice.

b) This new referrer string would allow Google to pass all clicks through their server thereby making it much easier for them to track the CTR for individual sites. As it has always been said that Google uses CTR data as a factor for their algorithm, now that Google can track individual CTR with so much precision I would think that they are very likely going to use these information for further refining the organic results.

Related Post:
Google Planning AJAX Interface – Doom’s Day for Analytics
Google Analytics Blog Post

The post Change in Google Referral Strings – Another Attempt to Push Google Analytics ? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

The main difference between the traditional Google search engine result pages and the new AJAX based pages is in the URL structure. A normal Google page looks like

http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=google+ajax&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

The AJAX version would look like..

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=google+ajax&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=google+ajax&fp=0k_STq_SEOg

Now what is the big difference between these two ?
Note the “#” in the second URL. On any Google query the URL string carries the query value under the “q” parameter and we can easily understand the keyword ( and at times other information as well) by looking at “?hl=en&q=google+ajax&btnG=Google+Search&meta=” part. In the new URL the query part is placed after the #.

All the web analytics packages that are used today, may it be a server based log analyzer or a JavaScript based analytics package; they work by parsing the data passed by browsers through the URL. So a traditional Google search URL could have been easily parsed to understand what was the keyword searched for, the language, the page in which the result was displayed and similar data. However, with this new URL structure, browsers would not be able to pass the value displayed after the” #” mark, as a result all your Google referrals would show up as just Google.com and there would be no way for your analytics package to tell you which keyword sent you the visitor and what was the keyword position in search results page.

It is probably not a small tweak in the JavaScript that would allow the analytics to track this data and the possibilities are that if Google decides to roll this out as a regular feature globally it would actually mean the end of all the existing analytics packages. Even Google analytics is not able to handle these URLs at present and shows the referrers as Google.com/referrer. However, it is a possibility that Google might do necessary modification to Google Analytics to track such AJAX based results before they role out the new feature globally. In such case it would spell the doom for all the existing analytics package and would actually create a virtual monopoly for Google analytics.

What are your thoughts on this?

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