Optimizing Google Analytics: Mastering Traffic Filters for Accurate Data

Hello and welcome to section four of the Google Analytics Bootcamp. We'll be discussing how to use filters to exclude certain types of website traffic from analysis on the Google Analytics platform. So, why use filters? Filters can help you customize your data to better suit your analysis needs, improve your data accuracy, and maintain the integrity of your data.

Here are some common uses of filters. Excluding internal and developer traffic. You can set up filters to exclude traffic from your company's IP address or addresses or specific internal traffic sources like your developers, like your marketing agency, because you don't want your performance data, your engagement data on your website to be skewed by visits from employees and others who are not actual customers or potential customers.

You can also include only specific subdomains or directories in situations where you have multiple subdomains and multiple directories within your website. And by doing this, you can track specific sections of your website separately. There are also lowercase or uppercase filters.

These filters can standardize the case, when I say case, lower or uppercase of URLs or parameters in your data, ensuring consistency in your reports. For example, if in one instance the page is named with a capital letter as the first letter, and in another instance that same exact page is denoted with a lowercase letter, you want Google Analytics to recognize that as being the same page as opposed to being two different pages, and this will ensure that that will happen. Hostname filters are another common filter.

You can filter data based on the hostname of the website. It's useful if you have multiple websites tracking under the same Google Analytics account, and you want to view data for each site separately. And then there are also custom filters.

Google Analytics allows you to create these custom filters to define more complex rules based upon various criteria such as recognizing specific patterns in URLs. Maybe you are an ecommerce site, and your part of the URL includes, for some of the pages, men's apparel. And you want to just look at men's apparel as opposed to women's apparel, children's apparel, and you can say all the pages that include men's apparel, we want to filter that out.

You're just seeing other examples like that. Okay, let's discuss one of the more common uses, which is to exclude the developer and other forms of internal traffic from analysis, and let's look at how you do that. So you go to the admin section of your site.

Under data collection and modification, you would click on data filters, create a filter, and choose which type of traffic, developer traffic or internal traffic. We're going to do each of these. We'll start with the developer because they're set up slightly differently.

So, developer traffic, you would first have to give it a name. You want to use a descriptive name that will make it easy for you to identify what this filter is. So let's go with the developer.

Developer traffic will be the name. Determine whether you want to exclude or include only. Since we are excluding it from the analysis, we'll go with the default exclude.

And then we will either have it created in a test mode, which is a suggested approach, testing it first, and making sure it excludes the traffic you want to exclude. And then once you are convinced that it is working, switch it to the active. And when you're ready to stop using it, for whatever reason, you can just click on inactive, right? So once you've done that, you just click create, and the filter will be in place.

Now one point to understand, this filter will work as long as the developers are, when they visit the site or work on the site, they are using the debug mode, right? Or debug event mode, which they would understand. Then Google Analytics will recognize this traffic as being developer traffic because it's in that mode, and it will exclude it, which is a little bit different from how we set up internal traffic. Again, you will give it a name and determine that you want to exclude it in this case.

And now here's the difference. So, before you get to this step, you would first have to identify the value for the parameter that will be checking the traffic type. And what that essentially means is identifying which IP addresses need to be excluded, which IP addresses represent internal traffic.

Unlike the developer one, which would automatically understand that any traffic in the debug mode qualifies as developer traffic. In this case, you have to define it. Now this step is done before you get here.

And since we haven't covered parameters yet, when we cover that in the next section, I'll show you how to create the parameter for internal traffic. But assuming you've done that, you get the same choice of starting in the testing active or inactive. And then you would just press create, and your filter will be in place.

So, just to review, go to the data collection and modification section of the admin section, click on data filters, click on create filter, and determine whether you want a developer or internal traffic filter. If it's a developer, just provide the name, exclude or include, testing active or inactive, and click create. And for internal traffic, you do auto steps, but you would first have had to identify what the internal traffic is by creating a parameter for that, providing the value for that parameter.

And in each case, the best practice is to test the filter before making it active.