When to use filters in Google Analytics

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Filtersin Google Analytics 4

If you work in digital marketing, you're probably familiar with Google Analytics, which collects data about your website visitors or users. You use Google Analytics when you want to find out how your visitors got to your website and to analyze what they do on your site.

Google Analytics has more features and capabilities than the average Google Analytics user is aware of. We at Contitude will be sharing our top tips and features of Google Analytics in a series of several blog posts. This post is the first in this series and is about filters in Google Analytics.

What is a filter in Google Analytics?

A filter in Google analytics is a setting that allows you to limit the data collected in Google Analytics. You can filter out data that you find irrelevant or that may give a misleading picture of reality. The possibilities of using filters in Google Analytics are endless and there are lots of uses that are good to know about.

Things to consider before using filters

Before you start filtering your data, there is one thing that is particularly important. Once you've added a filter, you can 't retrieve the data you've filtered out. Therefore, you should always use filters in a new view and keep a master view where you save all the data. You don't know in advance what data will be relevant to you in the future and it is unnecessary to remove access to that data.

How do you add a filter?

As mentioned above, you should always create a new view before you start adding filters, so this is always the first step.

Then open up "Administrator" (the gear at the bottom left of the main menu)

Then select the view you want to add the filter to and click on "Filter"

There you can overview all active filters and add new ones.

What should you use filters for?

There are many different reasons to use filters based on your needs. By far the most common is to exclude internal traffic.

Exclude internal traffic

Internal traffic means traffic coming to your website from someone in your office or from your developers. The reason for filtering out that data is that that traffic is not relevant to track or representative of how visitors behave on your website.

To filter out internal traffic, set up a filter that excludes all traffic from a particular IP number. You can find the IP number used in your office by searching for "my IP number" on Google.

Above is an example of how you can set up a filter to exclude a particular IP number.

Exclude certain countries

Another common purpose is to use filters to see traffic from certain countries. If you have a website in English and only target customers in Sweden, you are probably only interested in visitors from Sweden. Then you can filter out all other traffic to focus on the traffic that is most relevant to you.

Subdomain only

Sometimes it is relevant to be able to look only at traffic from a subdomain. The most common case is if you have a blog located on a subdomain, e.g. blogg.contitude.com, and you only want to see that traffic. Then you use the include only function as a filter to see only that traffic.

Summary

Filters can be very useful and are not that difficult to set up. The most important thing to remember when using filters is to always have a master view where all the data is stored. Once you have set up a filter, the data you filter out will be gone forever unless it is saved in another view.

There are many uses for filters, but the most common is to remove internal traffic so as not to get misleading data in Google analytics.

By setting up filters, you can get a clearer and more relevant presentation of your data. Google Analytics filters allow you to analyse your data more accurately and draw more accurate conclusions about what's important to your business.

Contact us if you need help with Google Analytics or measuring your marketing activities.Contact us and we'll tell you more!