Google Analytics Filter – Filter and Combine Traffic from eMail Sources
Filter Title: Combine Email Traffic from Gmail, Yahoo mail, AOL mail etc.
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
Google Analytics Filters – A “Big” Collection
I was going to call this post “Google Anaytics Filters – The Complete Collection” but then I realized, this just isn’t possible. The list will never be complete as every site is different and a proper analytics set-up includes the ability to answer the “business questions.” What are those you ask? (…and I’m glad you did). Business questions are the things you want to use the data to answer. A sites owner or management team might want to know “How many hits is our sub domain getting and how many leads does it generate” To properly track that, one would need a sub domain filter and goals created to track leads. Filters help answer business questions… they also help clean data… which in turn makes it easier to answer business questions. The goal of this post and every other post in the category “Google Analytics Filters” is to provide you, the gracious reader, a one-stop-shop for Google Analytics filters. I will do my best to keep the formats similar across each post and include. Each post will show:
- Filter Title
- Filter purpose
- Filter set up difficulty (easy, medium, hard)
- Filter set up instructions
- A screen shot of what the filter looks like
- A text base list of the values and fields used to enter into the Filter Information screen in Google Analytics
- 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.
What is a Cookie – Part 2
Part 1 of this series discussed some of the differences between how analytics packages work. Some of the most popular web analytics systems (Google Analytics, Omniture to name a couple) use Javascript which takes advantage of cookies. Part 1 covered most of this except for the difference between cookies.
There are 4 types of cookies that fall into two categories.
- First Party Cookies
- Third Party Cookies
- Persistent Cookies
- Temporary Cookies
First Party vs. Third Party Cookies
“Back in the day” analytics providers used third-party cookies which meant, when you visited a site, www.analyticscookies.com for example, the cookie was sent from the vendor – www.omniture.com for example. These third-party cookies handled visitors who navigated across multiple, unrelated domains within a companies site. Due to issues around privacy and issues around some companies using third-party cookies to provide personal information, users began to block third-party cookies. Most analytics vendors have now switched to first-party cookies.
A first-party cookie is now primarily used because web users tend to delete or reject them less frequently. As a result, they do a very good job of tracking repeat visitors. In fact, some sites like gmail won’t work unless you accept first party cookies.
Persistent vs. Temporary Cookies
A temporary cookie (also called transient or session cookie) is used to track a users session. When a user visits a site, performs some actions (clicks, navigates, perhaps fills out a form) these are tracked as a session. The cookie is set when you visit a site and deleted when you leave – hence the name “temporary”
A persistent cookie is set when a user visits a website for the first time. It will remain on a users computer for the duration that the website determines – more often than not, about 18 months. Persistent cookies remain until a users either deletes the cookie. If and when the cookies is deleted, and a user returns to the same website, the analytics package would define this second visit as a “new visit.” This, along with many other reasons are why analytics systems are never “perfect” and any good web analytics consultant should educate their clients of the limitations of some systems.
What is a Cookie? – Part 1
So how do web analytics packages work anyway? Well, that question is a little more complex that it might seem. It depends, are you referring to server based web logs, JavaScript tags? web beacons? or perhaps packet sniffers? These four options comprise the main ways web analytics programs work.
More and more, todays most popular web analytics programs use JavaScript. Examples of systems using JS include Google Analytics, Woopra, Mint, Omniture and more. So – how do they work… and what the heck is a cookie?
When a user visits your website (and you have installed one of these java script code blocks) the web server sends the requested page, along with a snippet of JavaScript code. The page loads and executes the JavaScript which captures all of the wonderful data about your visitor (page views, time on site, browser and so much more). This data is sent back to the collection server (Google, Omniture etc) where it is used to produce the reports for Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst and more.
Some web sites store information about you or your computer in a small file called a cookie. The cookie is stored on your hard drive. Cookies are used when you come back to a web site, the improve load time, remember settings, products added to a cart and a lot more. Sites that run analytics packages like Google Analytics issue first party cookies that allow the site to uniquely, but anonymously, identify individual visitors. This is how a visitors site behaviour is tracked. When a visitor returns to a site, these analytics package are able to remember that the visitor has been to the site before and adjust calculations and analytics metrics accordingly. Rather than registering this user twice as a unique visitor, they are tracked once – for example.
Wikipedia Listing for “Cookies”
Great Google Analytics training video about cookies and how Google Analytics uses them.
There are a few different variations of cookies which I will cover in Part 2.
Passing the Google Analytics IQ Test
The other night I decided to take an hour and write Google’s new Individual Qualification test. I took a spin through their training material first to “brush up” and make sure I knew what Google deemed important to know about their platform.
My assessment is that if you have even a basic understanding of the system and how to implement it, you will pass without issue (a 75% or higher is required to pass).
I found the test seemed to focus a lot on the relationship between Google Analytics and Google AdWords. There were a lot of questions about linking the two systems together, the importance of doing so and what happens if you don’t turn on “auto tagging” and “apply cost data.”
If you are studying and want to know what to focus on… steer clear of the last section on custom reporting, motion reports etc – there were no questions on these sections on my test (I assume Google randomly selects questions to use in different tests).
Over the coming days and weeks I will be blogging on some analytics basics, which can trip noobs up from time to time – like what a cookie is (fitting given my blog name 
).
My certificate:
