How to Set Up 5 Essential Google Analytics Filters: Video

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.

Video Transcription

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.

Filter 1 – Exclude Internal Traffic

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.

1. Log in to Google Analytics.
2. Click the Admin tab in the top right.
3. In the Account column on the left, click All Filters. This is where we will create our filters and then apply them to each Analytics Profile later
4. Click New Filter.
5. Give the filter a recognisable name like ‘Block Internal Traffic’.
6. Change ‘Traffic from the ISP domain’ to ‘Traffic from the IP addresses’ in the dropdown box.
7. Now we need to enter our IP address. Google can helpfully tell us this in no time at all – just Google ‘My IP’.
8. Then just copy and paste your IP address into the 4 boxes and click save. Don’t worry just yet about applying the filter to a particular view, we’ll do this later.

Filter 2 –Internal Traffic Only

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.

1. After logging in to the Admin area of Analytics, click All Filters under the Account column and then New Filter.
2. Give the filter a recognisable name like ‘Internal Traffic Only’.
3. Change ‘Exclude’ to ‘Include only’ and ‘traffic from the ISP domain’ to ‘Traffic from the IP addresses’ in the dropdown boxes.
4. Now we need to enter our IP address. Google can helpfully tell us this in no time at all – just Google ‘My IP’.
5. Then just copy and paste your IP address into the 4 boxes and click save. Again, we’ll apply the filter to a particular view later.

Filter 3 – Traffic to a Subdirectory Only

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.

1. After logging in to the Admin area of Analytics, click All Filters under the Account column and then New Filter.
2. Give the filter a recognisable name like ‘Blog Traffic Only’.
3. Change ‘Exclude’ to ‘Include only’ and ‘traffic from the ISP domain’ to ‘traffic to the subdirectories’ in the dropdown boxes.
4. Now we need to enter the name of the subdirectory you want to measure. In our case we would enter ‘/blog/’. Be careful to include both of the slashes.
5. Click save. Again, we’ll apply the filter to a particular view later.

Filter 4 – Lowercase URIs

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.

1. After logging in to the Admin area of Analytics, click All Filters under the Account column and then New Filter.
2. Give the filter a recognisable name like ‘Show Lowercase URIs’.
3. Select ‘Custom filter’ as the Filter Type and click the ‘Lowercase’ radio button.
4. In the Filter Field dropdown, select ‘Request URI’ under Content and Traffic.
5. Click save. Again, we’ll apply the filter to a particular view later.

Filter 5 – Irish Traffic Only

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.

1. After logging in to the Admin area of Analytics, click All Filters under the Account column and then New Filter.
2. Give the filter a recognisable name like ‘Irish Traffic Only’.
3. Select ‘Custom filter’ as the Filter Type and click the ‘Include’ radio button.
4. In the Filter Field dropdown, select ‘Country’ under Location.
5. In the Filter Pattern field, type ‘Ireland’.
6. Click save. Again, we’ll apply the filter to a particular view later.

Applying the filters to our Google Analytics profiles

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).

1. After logging in to the Admin area of Analytics, select the View (profile) you want to apply the filter to in the dropdown of the right hand column and click filters.
2. By default, there are no filters applied so click the red New Filter button.
3. Click the ‘Apply existing Filter’ radio button. This will show all of the filters that you’ve created.
4. To apply a filter, just click the name of the filter and then click ‘Add’ and save when you’re done.

Let us know.

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.