Google Analytics Profiles and Filters – So Much Power!

February 26, 2009Kayden Kelly

Google Analytics Profiles and Filters allow you to have so much more power and control over your analytics data. In fact, they allow you to do almost anything expensive web analytics packages can do.

Why Use Google Filters and Profiles?
Most importantly, filters allow you to make analytics data more meaningful by segmenting and cleaning the data to provide distinct, customized views of your data for different purposes and audiences. Profiles allow you to create separate views of your analytics data and they are key to using filters because you don’t ever want to add filters to your primary account profile. A word of caution, never add a filter to your primary profile as you must protect the integrity of this data and when setting up advanced filters it is easy to make a mistake that can severely damage your analytics data.

Basic Google Analytics Filters
You can create basic filters to exclude people (based on IP address, domain name and etc) from your company or your web agencies to avoid skewing your analytics reports. This is a filter that everyone should already have setup and in use. If you don’t have this setup this is where you need to start and you need to get this setup right away. Other basic filters give you the ability to separately track site subdomains, include only traffic from a specific geography, and etc. For example, we recently are working with a client that approaches marketing to USA and International (outside the USA) audiences separately and even has different agencies

Advanced Google Analytics Filters
More advanced filters can allow you to track your search engine rankings, see what adwords searchers really typed, see only organic traffic from Google, see only Google Image Search traffic, and much more. As we mentioned above, the power and potential of filters and profiles is really only limited by your imagination. Of course, many of us don’t have the time to play around and experiment so we highly recommend leveraging off the great ideas and examples that others in the industry are readily making available.

Great Resources on Google Analytics Filters and Profiles

• List of All Google Analytics Filter Fields and their purpose.
• Google Analytics Blog: How to create a custom filter
• LinkLove: Filters in Google Analytics (explains how to see what adwords searchers typed)
• ROI Revolution: Filtering Your Data (info on setting up the most important basic filter)
• Yoast: Track SEO Rankings with Google Analytics
• Yoast: New SEO Reports for Google Analytics
• Closed Loop Marketing: Advanced Google Analytics Profiles and Filters – Part 1
• Closed Loop Marketing: Advanced Google Analytics Profiles and Filters – Part 2

WARNING: Before you go crazy with adding filters always make sure that you leave your original profile untouched as a raw data profile with no filters applied. This is critical to maintain and protect the integrity of your analytics data because once you have filtered data out it is gone forever. New profiles are quick and easy to create. At the bottom of your account screen (the page that lists your website profiles) you will see an “Add Website Profile>>” link and to the right of it you will see the “Filter Manager>>” link where you manage your filters (screenshot provided below).

As always please leave your comments and we will be happy to answer your questions. Have a great day!

About the Author

Kayden Kelly

Kayden is the Founder and CEO of Blast Analytics & Marketing. He leads overall strategy and execution in positioning Blast as a leading analytics and digital marketing consulting company. An industry trailblazer who stays ahead of trends and opportunities, Kayden has spent nearly two decades building his expertise in all areas, with a deep focus on analytics, search engine optimization, and user experience. He is an evangelist for “the customer,” helping clients create sustainable competitive advantage by developing, optimizing, distributing, and connecting valuable content to customer needs. Connect with Kayden on LinkedIn. Kayden Kelly has written 48 posts on the Blast Digital Customer Experience and Analytics Blog.