Setting up and working with Filters in Google Analytics

Using filters is a basic tool that can help you ignore data that is of no use to you, or that will cause inaccuracies in your data. It’s important that before you start working with filters you know which reports and which data matter to you or your organization, so as to avoid future complications or worse: gaps in your data.

Another tool that helps you organize your data better is segmentation.

Available filters in Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a powerful set of filters which can easily be set through the Account Settings dashboard. By clicking the option Filter Manager, at the bottom of the Website Profiles table, you’ll be able to access the Filters dashboard. The top right hand option Add Filter allows you to create new filters, based on the following pre-set options:

• Exclude all clicks from a domain: Using this filter you can exclude tracking of visitors to your site that come from specific referring sites
• Exclude all clicks from an IP address: This filter option will allow you to filter out any visits made to your site from a specific IP address or IP range
• Include only traffic from a specific subdirectory: This filter is particularly handy when creating separate website profiles to track certain parts of sites, based on subdirectories in your site’s page structure
• Custom filter

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Working with user access management in Google Analytics

Access Management is another option you’ll find in most web analytics tools. It’s the ability to enable others (colleagues, manager, administrator or simply partner) to look into and control (optional) Google Analytics reports.

Sharing a single account might not be something one would naturally do and it might be something that makes many people nervous (accidental changes or mistakes made by others can be extremely frustrating), but thankfully the GA Access Manager lets you control who has access and to what degree they can manipulate settings.

Something to be careful with is user access when you track multiple websites within the same account. Should you enable other users to access your account with administrator privileges, they will be able to view reports for your other sites as well. Should you want to avoid other users from seeing reports for sites that they do not need to look into you can choose to grant access only to a single website profile (rather than providing them with access to the whole account), but only for “Read only” users, not administrator enabled users. This can be done within the Access Manager, but also by editing Website Profile settings.

You can find the Access Manager option at the bottom of the Analytics Settings page, and this will take you to the Access Management settings dashboard. Here you can add users and manage user access.

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Working with website profiles in Google Analytics

In order to use advanced settings for Google Analytics, log in to your account and you’ll land on the settings dashboard straight away.

Website Profiles

GA offers the option to track multiple websites within the same account, which is a handy feature that most web analytics tools offer these days. Besides completely separate sites, you can create profiles to track subdomains or parts of a single website separately. On the settings dashboard you’ll notice a table of Website profiles, which gives you an overview of sites currently tracked and their tracking status.

Adding a profile

1. In the Website Profiles table, click Website Profile
2. An information page appears, which offers you the option to add a profile for a new domain or an existing domain (in case you’d like to track part of one of your sites or a subdomain).
3. In case you’re adding a profile for a new domain, select whether the site is an HTTP or HTTPS site, provide the website URL which you’d like to track and select your country from the drop-down list, and click Continue. In case you’d like to add a profile for an existing domain, select the domain in question, enter a new profile name, select your country from the drop-down list, and click Finish.
4. If you’re creating a profile for a new domain, the Tracking Status screen will show up, providing you with the script you’ll need to place on all pages of your sites (or in your site’s templates).

Once you’ve added the code to your website, Google Analytics will change the tracking status of the new profile to Pending and to Receiving Data when enough data has been gathered to start reporting. Keep in mind, however, that to make sense of your reporting data you’ll need at least a couple of months’ worth of data!
So why would you set up separate profiles for parts/subdomains of your sites? The main benefit is that you can adjust specific settings for each part. This can be particularly handy in case you’d like to use customized segmentation more than once on the same site. (Customized segmentation can generally be used for one specific purpose in Google Analytics.)

Should conversion paths go through other parts/subdomains, you can adjust the Google Analytics code and track a single page in multiple accounts.

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Google Analytics vs AWstats log file analysis – the differences

Google Analytics provides decent functionality and data, but how much more value is there when compared to a log file analysis tool like AWstats and what are the benefits or using one versus the other?

AWstats

AWstats (Advanced Web Statistics) is an open source log analyzer written in Perl that can use a variety of log formats and runs on a variety of operating systems. AWstats was designed with the main purpose to inform system administrators rather than website business owners, web marketers and web analysts, which basically means that making sense of AWstats data for marketing/business purposes is not very straightforward. Moreover, the reports are extremely basic and just spit out raw data which doesn’t tell you an awful lot about the website dynamics and stats that matter to improve your efforts.

AWstats processes the log files that most web servers churn out by default and organizes the data in a bunch of basic reports. This tool was designed for the needs of “Way back when…” so it’ll be of limited use. One major difference between data collection methods of AWstats and GA, is that the first logs data on the physical webserver, whereas GA logs data on the site itself and stores the information in a remote location (on Google’s servers).

Should you compare figures of AWstats and GA like with like, you’ll notice that AWstats figures will be much larger. An important reason for this is the fact that AWstats detects search engine bots that access (“crawl”) your website to learn more about its content, link structure etc., whereas GA can’t detect this type of traffic. These days, crawl stats are far less important than back in the day, and information on how search engine bots see your website is readily available from the major search engines, once you sign up to look into these services. Examples are Google Webmaster tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

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The differences between the Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths reports

There seems to be some uncertainty about how the Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths reports differ from each other in the data they represent. It’s actually quite straightforward: The Navigation Summary report shows you 1. Whether the page you’re analyzing is a popular landing page and how many visitors it manages to keep on your site and 2. Whether the page in question is a secondary conversion page that can be optimized to improve conversions. The Entrance Path report is intended to show you which pages are viewed after visitors enter your site on a particular landing page.

Working in tandem, a combination of these reports forms a good basis for landing page analysis in answering these questions, amongst others:

• How many visitors exit my site from my landing pages (bounce rate) and how many visit other pages, starting from the landing page?
• How important are my landing pages for my site’s conversion paths?
• Which pages are viewed after having entered my site on particular landing pages?
• Am I targeting the right keywords with my landing pages and do visitors think my landing page content is relevant to their search query?

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