The ROI Revolution Blog

Articles Tagged with 'Filters'

Handling Email Referrals in Google Analytics

January 24, 2011

If you’ve spent any time looking through your traffic sources in Google Analytics, particularly your referral sources, you may have noticed a lot of your traffic coming various mail sources:

Clearly it’s not terribly useful to see your traffic broken out this way. At the very least, you would want to consolidate all of those mail.yahoo.com sources.

But if you think about it, it probably doesn’t matter a whole lot which email service provider a visitor happened to be using when they clicked to your site. Perhaps it’d be better if we just consolidate all of those email sources into one entry. Not only would this significantly clean up reports, but it would also allow you to see the overall impact of traffic coming from email to your site.

The easiest way to handle this is by using filters:

Keep Reading »

Keep Track of Changes to Your Profiles

January 16, 2008

It’s hard to get things right the first time. You may come up with a brilliant plan for your Google Analytics setup and think that you’ve thought of everything, only to have the data start coming in and realize that things are not looking quite like you hoped they would. Or perhaps your analytics just need a modification and you need to change your goal steps or create new ones. When these kinds of things happen, you may need to alter your Google Analytics profile settings.

And that’s OK. While we recommend setting up a “sandbox” profile where you can test what effect changes to your profile might have on your data before editing your main profile, at some point you’ll have to make those changes live in order to reap the benefits of cleaner, better data. When this happens, you will want to record those changes.

Keep Reading »

Default Page vs. Home Page

December 12, 2007

You’ve probably played around with the Default Page setting in Google Analytics. In many cases, this is definitely the way to go, as it will prevent your home page from showing up in different ways in your Google Analytics reports (as / and /index.html for example).

But you need to be careful when you set the default page, as it will not only affect your home page, but any page that ends with a forward slash (‘/’).

What do I mean by this? It’s pretty simple – if you set the default page to index.html, it will not only change any future / entries into /index.html, but if you have another page ending in /, say /blog/, it will change that to /blog/index.html too. But what if your blog’s default page is actually /blog/index.php? Well, then you have a problem.

If you have several such subdirectories or pages, then you have several problems. The good news is that there is a simple way to create a simple filter that only replaces the home page.

Keep Reading »

Excluding Internal Traffic the Easy Way

November 20, 2007

If you’ve done research on excluding internal traffic from your Google Analytics reports, then you’ve probably heard words like “user defined variable”, “dynamic or static IP address”, and “orphaned web page.” While you may want to become familiar with these terms someday, the truth is that not everyone is a webmaster.

What’s my point? Well, I’m not sure if anyone’s come up with this before, and quite frankly I wouldn’t be surprised as this method is very easy, but here’s a quick and easy way to exclude any kind of internal traffic from your reports, regardless of IP-whats-its. All you have to know is how to write an email.

Here’s how:

Keep Reading »

Matching Specific Transactions to Specific Keywords

May 2, 2007

One of the great things about Google Analytics is the ability to view overall trends for your website. You can, for example, see how well all visitors who come from AdWords are reaching one of your goals. You can see how valuable the average visit from an email campaign is to your ecommerce business. You can see total transactions and revenue, and see what percentage of transactions are coming from a specific marketing source.

But what if you want to see where a specific transaction came from? What if you get a very large order and you want to see what the marketing source for that specific order is? Well, now you can, with a set of three custom filters that work together.

Here are the details:

Keep Reading »

View Visitor IP Address in Google Analytics

September 20, 2006

There’s no way to view your visitors IP addresses right out of the box with Google Analytics. You can view visitor location and ISP in Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance, under the Domains and Geo Location reports.

But surely Google Analytics must collect the IP address, or there’s no way that it could calculate visitor location and ISP.

In fact, it does collect this data from each visitor that accesses your site. Better still, the data is easily accessible with a fairly straightforward Advanced Filter and the User Defined variable. Here’s how.

Keep Reading »

Exclude Internal Visits from Google Analytics

February 22, 2006

Back in November, Amit Agarwal wrote about preventing Google Analytics from tracking visits via an edit to the Windows Host file. This is an effective work-around for excluding traffic from internal PCs with dynamic IP addresses, but tweaking the Hosts file is a bit tricky for the average user. Plus, if you’ve got dozens or hundreds of employees, it’s really not practical.

Using Google Analytics’ Visitor Segmentation, you can achieve the same result, much more efficiently and with a lot less work on your internal users’ end.

Keep Reading »

Filtering Your Data

January 4, 2006

Control is everything when it comes to web site analytics. You want to make sure you’re tracking the right data, and you need to make sure you’re tracking the data right. With traffic filters, you can control exactly which data are flowing into your Google Analytics profile, and which aren’t.

There are three predefined filters that you can use, right out of the box:

• Exclude all clicks from a domain (hostname), which can be used to exclude all clicks originating from one network. Get rid of the hits from your internal office network. Just plug in your hostname here and apply to your profile.
• Exclude all clicks from an IP address, which is great for removing any clicks from a single IP address, or even a range of IP addresses. Take a visit to www.whatismyip.com, then plug in the IP address here to exclude any computer that has a static IP address from your data results.
• Include only traffic from a subdirectory will allow you to set your profile to only report on a subdomain or a subdirectory. Use this to only see traffic to your nonfiction titles (www.example.com/nonfiction/) or to your user’s section (users.example.com).

Keep Reading »

Blog Navigation Categories: Online Advertising Website Optimization Analytics Company Archives: -- Select Month -- November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 December 2013 July 2013 May 2013 March 2013 January 2013 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 November 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 SEARCH: Related searches: google traffic tagged reading posted gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page or responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site. gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.