Semalt Expert: Everything You Have To Know About View Filters

Ivan Konovalov, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, states that you should use filters for modifying and limiting the data in a view. For instance, it is possible to use filters for excluding traffic from a particular IP address. You can include data from the desired subdomains and directories and can convert dynamic pages to readable texts and strings. You will have to seek permission at an account level before managing the filters.

Video overview:

In this section, you should set primary filters after watching the video, which is the part of the Digital Analytics Fundamentals program. That has been introduced in the Analytics Academy. The video link is here: analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com.

Predefined filters:

The preset filters should be excluded from your Google Analytics data. For this, you should use the filters to exclude or include the traffic from specific domains, such as a company network or an ISP. When you have specified the domain name, you should not include its host server label without permission.

Another thing you should bear in mind is excluding only traffic from the referred IP addresses. This filter can be used to exclude or include the clicks from a specific IP address or a particular source. Filtering a range of IP addresses with this option is possible. If you want to filter more sophisticated ranges of addresses, you should use the Custom Filter option for excluding it. Alternatively, you can use the IP address for specifying the regular expressions as a Filter Pattern.

Custom filters:

• Exclude: It can exclude the log file lines that match your Filter Pattern. You should ignore the parallel lines to ensure the safety of your website on the internet.
• Include: It includes the log file lines that will match your Filter Pattern. All of the non-matching hits should be ignored, and the data in those hits is non-trusted in your Google Analytics report.
• Lowercase and Uppercase: It is possible to convert the content of field into lowercase or uppercase, based on your requirements.
• Search and Replace: It is a straightforward and excellent filter that can be used for searching patterns within a field. It helps replace the patterns with most suitable alternatives.
• Advanced: It lets you build the fields from one point to another. The filtering engine will apply all the expressions in two Extract fields. It then constructs another field with the help of the Constructor expression.

Uses for filters:

Here we have described some uses of filters:

• Excluding internal traffic from the reports: Filters can be used to exclude the internal traffic from your Google Analytics reports. For this, you should set up the filters that identify the IP addresses you want to ban.
• Report the activities in specific directories: If you are looking to report the activities in some specific directories, you should set up a filter that can identify those directories.
• Track subdomains in the separate views: If you want to track subdomains, you should create separate views for each domain and subdomain. You should also include filters to identify the specific subdirectories.