The best part of digital marketing is the data. One of the worst parts of digital marketing is… the data. Any kind of digital analytics collects more data than can possibly be used and often the data coming in is not in the ideal format. Fortunately, the web analytics tools from Google, Omniture, Webtrends, etc. have gotten much better in the last few years and they do a lot of the heavy lifting of data clean up for us. But there will always be website specific tweaks that need to be made.
To parse through the mountain of data that comes through analytics, there are two “tools” that we can use to limit the data collected and/or our view of the data: filters and segments. Filters are server-side tools that limit the data that is loaded into the analytics tools. They are typically used to remove test traffic or clean-up extraneous data being collected in URLs. Generally these are only setup by administrators, but with the ease of the interfaces today, anyone can do it. Filters usually make permanent changes to the recorded data. Segments on the other hand, are client-side filters that can be setup in a profile and can be turned and off to compare different groups within your visitor audience. Typical segments include visitors from search, visits that completed a goal or visits from a campaign. Segments are very powerful analysis tools and I’ll be talking about them a lot more in the future.
Today, I wanted to briefly talk about filtering and some effective filters I use on a regular basis. My example code is for Google Analytics, but these filters can work on any analytics solution. Before we talk about the filters themselves, I should probably back up and talk about profiles. Since filters are destructive (they change the actual stored data), I always recommend creating multiple profiles for a specific domain. In Google, this is done with the “+ Add new profile” link on the Settings screen. At a minimum, I create a ‘Full Data’ profile with no filters and then a ‘Clean’ profile with all my basic filters applied. So with that in place, these are the filters I apply to my ‘Clean’ profile.
| 1. Filter yourself out One of the most important things to do in your clean profile is to make sure that you (or your agency/partners) are not skewing the data. The easiest way to prevent this is to setup an IP filter for your company and anyone you regularly work with that aren’t true customers/visitors. You can start by going to www.whatismyip.com and seeing what IP you are displaying to the world. It may be as simple as loading that into Google or you might have to talk with your IT group if you find that your filter isn’t working. | This filter covers a large range of IP addresses, but yours may be as simple as the example on the page (63\.212\.171\.123) |
| 2. Removing the Query String This filter is not for everyone, and this is another case where I might setup a extra profile, but if your site has a lot of extra data in the URL after the question mark that is making the same page look like multiple pages in analytics, then you might want to try this one. Field A: Request URL = (.*)\?(.*) Output: Request URI = $A1 This splits the page URL into two parts, the file name and the query string, then overwrites the full URL with just the first part (the file name/path) | |
| 3. Clean up Email Provider sub-domains If you do any amount of email marketing, you’ll see that in your Referrers to the site, a lot of different domain names all from the same provider (us.mc317.mail.yahoo.com, us.mg3.mail.yahoo.com, us.mg201.mail.yahoo.com, etc.). These are all Yahoo mail, but they aren’t nicely combined into one line. I use this simple filter to strip off the extra sub-domain information for the top email providers. Field A: Campaign Source = (.*)(mail\.yahoo\.com|webmail\.aol\.com|mail\.live\.com) Output: Campaign Source = $A2 This spits the referring URL into two parts, and drops off the sub-sub-domain that varies for each email provider. |
There are many other filters that I use, but these are some of the basics. I’ll post additional recommendations on more advanced filters in future posts.
