In this week’s episode, Kevin McAuley takes us through setting up 5 essential filters in Google Analytics.
The 10 minute video will show step by step how to set up the following 5 essential Google Analytics filters
Welcome to the third week of iProspect TV! In this week’s episode, Kevin McAuley takes us through setting up 5 essential filters in Google Analytics.
The 10 minute video will show step by step how to set up the following 5 essential Google Analytics filters:
1. Exclude Internal Traffic Filter
2. Internal Traffic Only Filter
3. Traffic to a Subdirectory Only Filter
4. Lowercase URIs Filter
5. Irish Traffic Only Filter.
By default, Google Analytics doesn’t apply any filters to your data meaning that your data can be clouded and not as reliable as you’d like it to be. For example, you might want to filter out visits to your website that your staff make or you might want to track traffic only from one specific country. In this video, we’ll show you exactly how to do this in Google Analytics.
One word of warning though – whenever we set up
Google Analytics for our clients here n iProspect, we always create a profile named ‘Unfiltered Traffic’ which has no filters applied. This is really just good practice and acts as a safety net should anything go wrong.
With that said, let’s get our hands dirty and delve into the world of Google Analytics filters.
One of the key things about any web analytics software is ensuring that the data you’re using to make business decisions is as clean as possible. If staff in your business are regularly visiting your company website, your analytics data is going to become clouded very quickly. Let’s put a stop to that by filtering out internal traffic to your website.
This filter is the exact opposite of the previous filter. It’s really useful for testing purposes because you can test Analytics settings on your site and know that the actions you take are from you and not an external visitor.
This filter is really useful if you have a heavily trafficked area of your site such as a blog and want to look at data for that area of your site only.
By default, Google Analytics captures data as it appears in a visitor’s browser. This means that you can have two URLs that show the same content but appear as separate entries due to different cases in the URLs, both lowercase and uppercase. For example, www.iprospect.ie/blog and www.iprospect.ie/BLOG would appear as separate listings in Google Analytics which is far from ideal. Let’s rectify that.
Many of our clients at iProspect want to target Irish consumers only. A great way to make sure our data is as clean as possible is to filter out traffic coming from other parts of the world. Let’s show you how that’s done.
Now we’ve created all of our beautiful, super useful filters, we need to apply them to our Google Analytics profiles (or ‘Views’ as they are now called).
Let us know what you think of the video! Do you think any additional Google Analytics filters are essential? We would love to hear your thoughts.