Google Analytics Profiles and Filters Part 1: The Must-Haves

Google Analytics (GA) is quickly becoming the analytics package of choice for many companies.

This is not surprising. I mean, it’s FREE!

But that aside, some of the more intricate functionality and customizable components of GA hold real value, and should be utilized. This article is part 1 of a two-part series on Google Analytics Profiles and Filters.

GA filters do just what their name implies. They filter out data so you can more easily find the pertinent information.

Profiles allow you to create different data sets with varying filters for separate reporting. Incorporating these separate profiles and filters into your GA setup can help you analyze data more accurately and efficiently.

Then, if you actually act on your analyses, you can potentially increase your site’s conversion rate.

Profiles and Filters Work Together

An important concept in GA is the idea of separate profiles. You should create a separate profile for each set of data you want to analyze, and then apply the appropriate filter(s) for each profile. It is easier to explain by example, so the rest of this post is a list of what I consider to be must-have profiles & filters, and how to enable them.

Creating Profiles

To create a profile you simply go to your Analytics Settings and click on Add a New Profile:

Create the following profiles:

1. All Raw Data Profile

This is the easy one. It’s your original profile. You don’t have to apply any filters. You should always keep a profile that collects all data. This can act as a sort of safety-valve if you accidentally filter out the wrong data on other profiles.

2. Filtered Data General

In this profile add filters to exclude all of your internal IP addresses and to change all data to lowercase. (See Create the Filters below.) You really don’t need to know (usually) data on how your internal team is using the site. You want to change all data to lowercase because some servers will allow products.html and Products.html, and GA will count them as separate data.

3. New Visitors and Returning Visitors

Create these two separate profiles and add filters to track only new visitors and only returning visitors. This easily lets you pull reports and check data on these two types of users which can help you ascertain how new visitors use the site (or perhaps more importantly, how they leave it), and can also help shed light on what returning customers are interested in.

4. Paid Traffic and Organic Traffic

This really only applies if you are running any paid search campaigns. If you are, you should create profiles and filters to track only Paid Traffic and only Organic Traffic. Again, this lets you easily track the behaviors of these two types of visitors which can help you make informed decisions on how to increase your conversion rate.

Create the Filters

To create the filters go to Analytics Settings and click on Filter Manager.

Then you can click on Add Filter.

Now you can name and create the filter and choose which profiles to add it to:

Exclude Internal IPs

Name the filter. Choose “Exclude all traffic from an IP address” from the Filter Type drop-down menu and enter the appropriate IP. Be sure to include the backslash before each period as GA filters use regular expressions.

Make All Lowercase

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Lowercase” radio button. Choose “Request URI” from the Filter Field drop-down menu.

New Visitors

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Include” radio button. Choose “Visitor Type” from the Filter Field drop-down menu. Type “new” as the Filter Pattern.

Returning Visitors

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Include” radio button. Choose “Visitor Type” from the Filter Field drop-down menu. Type “returning” as the Filter Pattern.

Paid Traffic

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Include” radio button. Choose “Campaign Medium” from the Filter Field drop-down menu. Type “cpc|ppc” as the Filter Pattern. The “pipe” character is part of a regular expression that means “or”. For this feature to track your Google Adwords paid traffic correctly, auto-tagging much be turned on in Google Adwords. Linking your Adwords and Analytics accounts will enable auto-tagging. For it to work with other paid search platforms, you must use link-tagging.

Organic Traffic

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Include” radio button. Choose “Campaign Medium” from the Filter Field drop-down menu. Type “organic” as the Filter Pattern.

You can see that profiles and filters work hand-in-hand to help you segment pertinent data.So, set up the profiles, add the appropriate filters, and ANALYZE THE DATA! I guarantee you will find some surprising information that will lead to informed changes which will lead to more conversions. Good luck.

(Look for Part 2 of this post soon where I will cover Advanced Filters.)

View related topics: google analytics, google filters, google profiles