Using Filters in Google Analytics to Ensure Accurate Data

Written by Martin Wong on January 4, 2010

Using analytics software to track, measure and learn about the traffic on your website is an essential component of Internet marketing. With Google Analytics, you can apply filters to your website profile that  ensure you have the most accurate data possible. With these filters, you can separate out traffic from your webmaster and website editors so that you can focus on how your clients find and navigate your website.

To get started, you can access the Filter Manager in Google Analytics by clicking on “Analytics Settings” in the top left corner of your browser window. From the Analytics Settings page, click on “Filter Manager” in the bottom right. In the Filter Manager you can create a new filter by clicking on “+ Add Filter” link on top right of the “Existing Filters” table.

Google Analytics Filters

#1 – Exclude Internal Address Filter

To make your statistical data as accurate as possible, you will probably want to exclude traffic from within your company. At the very least, you should exclude the IP of the webmaster and the employees who do the editing on your pages. You can easily do this by excluding the entire IP address range of your company’s network. If you don’t know your IP address, use What Is My Ip?. Once you have your IP address handy, Google has created a tool to exclude traffic from a range of IP addresses. Simply cut and paste the code Google gives you into the IP address box as shown below.

#2 – All Lowercase Only Filter

A problem in Google Analytics is that it is not case-sensitive, so it will track a page differently depending on how it is typed into the browser. For example, if your website’s main page is www.website.com/index.html, Analytics will track www.website.com/Index.html or www.website.com/index.Html as different pages. This can easily complicate the analysis of your website’s traffic. To fix this problem, you can add a very easy filter.

From the Add Filter Page again, select “Custom Filter” from the Filter Type dropdown menu. Select Lowercase from the radio buttons and then for the “Filter Field” dropdown menu select “Request URI”

#3 Full Referral URL Filter

Another small problem in the basic setup of Google Analytics is that it shortens the website URLs in the referring traffic results. This can make it difficult to find the exact page on the website that is referring you traffic. To solve this problem, you will need a filter that allows the display of the full website URL in the Visits section of Google Analytics.

To do this, create a new filter called “Full Referral URL” and then from the “Filter Type” dropdown menu choose “Custom Filter” (you can also refer to graphic below to see how to input the information). Next, select the “Advanced” radio button.  In the “Field A > Extract A” menu select “Referral” from the dropdown menu and enter (.*) in the text field, which tells Analytics to select the entire URL. For the “Field B > Extract B” menu you can leave the dropdown menu and text field empty.

Next, from the “Output To > Constructor” menu select “User Defined” from the dropdown menu and enter “$A1″ in the text field. For the radio buttons below, in “Field A Required” select the Yes radio button, in “Field B Required” select the No radio button, in “Override Output Field” select the Yes radio button and in “Case Sensitive” select the No radio button.  Save the new Filter Profile and you’re done.

There you have it, three Google Analytics filter profiles that will make your website statistics more accurate. I recommend that you quickly add these filter profiles whenever you create a new Google Analytics account. To learn more about advanced features in Google Analytics, you can download our latest Google Analytics White Paper.