Filter Name: Display Full URL

Filter Purpose: This filter comes in handy when you are tracking multiple sub domains or third party domains in one profile.  Before I continue, if you are attempting to do this, make sure you read how here and understand that you will “break” the site overlay report.  Applying this filter will show you the full URL from you main site, sub domain or third party domain.

Filter Difficulty: Easy

Instructions:

Create a test profile – always a good idea when testing with filters.

Filter Name: Display Full URL

Filter Type: Custom Filter

Advanced

Field A -> Extract A = Referral – (.*)

Field B -> Extract B = User Defined – $A1

Case Sensitive – NO

Filter Credit: Reuben Yeu – Online Marketing and SEO Consultant

Filter Purpose: Whether your website serves a large organization or is a small “mom and pop shop” filtering out internal traffic can make a big difference in the statistics you generate from Google Analytics – or any analytics package for that matter.  If you measure Goals (and I strongly recommend you do), in general, an internal visitor to the site (employee etc) is less likely to complete a goal (form fill out or purchase) as that isn’t their intention of visiting the site.  Further to that, many large organizations set their computers to default to the company home page as the first site a browser loads when opening.  As a result, you would most likely see an abnormally high bounce rate, low page views and skewed numbers to your return visitor stats.  Thus, filtering out your internal traffic is very important.

Filter Difficulty: easy – moderate (depending on if you have multiple IP ranges to filter).

Instructions:

1. Make a record of the individual IP addresses and a list of the IP ranges for your company.

2. Create individual IP filters for the individual IP addresses, be careful to use the proper regular expressions when creating your filter.  For example, the IP address 173.32.223.162 should be entered in as  173\.32\.223\.162

3. Take your IP ranges and enter them into Google’s handy IP Address Exclusion generator here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55572

An individual IP Address Exclusion should look like this:

An IP range filter, using Google’s tool above, should look like this:

Filter Name: IP Address Filter

Filter Type: Exclude All Traffic from an IP Address

Filter Field: IP Address

Filter Purpose: To ensure URL’s and pages that can be visited/accessed using both upper case and lower case characters are reported as the same page.  For example:

www.analyticscookies.com/Google-Analytics.html

www.analtyticscookies.com/google-analytics.html

are reported as the same page.  Without this filter, Google Analtyics will report these pages as unique, when they should be the same.

Filter Difficulty: easy

Instructions: As with every filter, be sure to create a test profile so as to keep your main site data in tact.

Filter Name:Force Lowercase

Filter Type: Custom Filter, Lowercase

Filter Field: Request URI

Filter Credit: Google

Purpose: To combine traffic from email’s, specifically email programs like gmail, yahoo, live, msn, aol etc.  A quick look at your Google Analytics reports will show something like the screen shot below if you don’t use filters like these.  By applying this filter, your referral reports will show cleaner data sets without “one off” visits from “by128w.bay128.mail.live.com/referral”

Filter Difficulty: easy/medium

Instructions: As with every filter, be sure to create a test profile so as to keep your main site data in tact.

Filter Name: Email Aggregation – Yahoo

Filter Type: Custom Filter, Search and Replace

Filter Field: Campaign Source Search String: ^.*\.mail\.yahoo\.co.*$

Replace String: yahoo mail (or whatever you choose to call it)

Case Sensitive: No

To create this same filter for Google, MSN/Live and others, simply have a look at the traffic sources in your reports, and change the Search String field to include mail.live.com for example. Alternativly, another way to create a filter for emails is as follows

Filter Name: Email Aggregation – Yahoo

Filter Type: Custom Filter/Advanced

Field A – Extract A: Campaign Source – (.*)\.mail\.yahoo\.com$

Field B – Extract B: Blank – Blank

Output To – Constructor: Campaign Source – mail.yahoo.com

This will take all emails from mail.yahoo.com and reformate the refurring source in your reports to show “mail.yahoo.com”

Filter Credits: Carlos del Rio at User Driven Change

1. Filter Title
2. Filter purpose
3. Filter set up difficulty (easy, medium, hard)
4. Filter set up instructions
5. A screen shot of what the filter looks like
6. A text base list of the values and fields used to enter into the Filter Information screen in Google Analytics
7. Filter credits – I will do my best to credit as many sources that I have seen publish these filters.  I ask for your forgivness in advance if I have missed a credit – please post a comment if you know of where credit should be given.