0:00
[MUSIC PLAYING] Now, that we have Google Analytics enabled on our website sites with all of the necessary features enabled, we can now go into creating views and filters to ensure that we have the cleanest data possible. This will help us remove any erroneous spam or internal traffic that might skew our reporting. So let's get building some filters. When we're setting up our views, it's really important to include filters within some of these views in order to consolidate the information and cut out a lot of the noise.
0:37
I'm going to walk you through some of my favorites that I include on every analytics profile that I work on. The first filter I want to show you is the full URL filter. This is really helpful if you have multiple subdomains or you're running your analytics snippet on different URLs and domains. This will make sure that when we are looking at our reports, we can see the full URL including your domain name and not just the slug within the reports.
1:04
This will make sure that we don't inadvertently collect the same URLs into one line item when they actually should be two or three. Lowercase URL filter is a really handy one for making sure that we don't accidentally have too many URLs of the same nature. If someone were to type in a URL with a capital letter and then another person with a lowercase letter, then those would be considered two different line items in our analytics reports.
1:35
This filter will make sure that those two are put together and reported in one item. So that we have a consistent user view. Ever since Google Analytics took away our ability to see what keywords are driving traffic and converting users on our website sites, we have had to deal with this not provided element in our analytics reports. This filter although it doesn't give us the exact keywords that people are using, it does help us understand what pages they're using when they click from Google over to our website.
2:10
It's not a perfect replacement for the keywords, but it's definitely a good alternative to nothing. In every analytics profile, spam is a huge burden. It's really hard to get all of the spam removed from our analytics profiles, and this is often a moving target. So we always have to be continuously iterating and reviewing our reports to try and find more spam to remove.
2:37
One common one that I see is URL refers using xyz in their domain names. I don't know why, but it's probably the most common of the domain names that result in spam views. So with this filter, we'll exclude all URLs with xyz at the end of it from our reports. This will ensure that at least a little bit of that spam is removed.
3:07
Language spam is another way that spammers like to manipulate and mess up our analytics reporting. When a legitimate user is browsing the internet, they will have a predefined language code identified in their browser so that when they arrive to our website, Google Analytics picks that up and can use it in some of the reporting with spammers.
3:30
They'll often use made up ones or not include a language at all because most of these are bots and artificial intelligence crawlers. So here, we want to grab this filtered pattern, which I'll share in the show notes for you to go in and remove any language that doesn't meet the normal coding of the defined languages. Hostname spam is another common one up there with the language of spam.
4:01
Most often, spammers that are using bots to access our websites won't set a proper hostname because they didn't actually come from a specific website or browser. So here, if they don't have a set hostname, we can exclude them from our reports to ensure that the actual traffic that is visiting our website came from a legitimate spot.
4:26
The last filter I want to show you is one that is often overlooked in analytics profiles. And that's excluding our own internal traffic from our imports because we spend the most time on our website above anybody else that can have a huge impact on our reporting when we're not actually interacting on the website like a normal user would. So in order to exclude our traffic, we're going to navigate to google.com and type in, what is my IP.
4:57
When you hit Enter, it will output the proper IP address for you to paste into the IP address bar, and from then on, you'll no longer see your own internal traffic.
