Google Analytics Filter Management

Name: Google Analytics Filter Management
Author: Christopher Pittman

Usage of filters and other functions to screen data in GA4

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Course: On-Demand

In this video, we're going to be discussing filters, what filters are used for, and then we'll get into how to set up filters in the next couple of videos. But filters are data sets that we want to exclude from reporting, and that could be at an account level, and that could be at a individual report level; it really depends on what you are needing as far as what data to exclude. Common things that are excluded in filters are known bots and the company IP address. So if you have multiple IP locations, you want to go through and exclude those, and what that does is that will limit down the amount of traffic that gets reported from those locations. So if you have a call center, if you have a office where people often just leave the website up in case customers have questions, that kind of thing, you want to go ahead and exclude that IP address from reporting. And the IP address is typically assigned to a individual address, so if you just exclude one IP address, you don't have to exclude each individual computer; there's not really a need for that, just a bulk exclude for that address often works really well. We'll be demonstrating that in the next video. So that's been a brief discussion of filters, how to use them and why we want to use them. We want to use them to make sure we get clean data sets in our reporting because it's often misleading. If you have a lot of employee data in your reporting, it's going to show conflated website metrics which could affect marketing; it could affect a lot of decisions within that area and also could hurt your website SEO overall because you are running a whole bunch of employees on the website and they're not actively purchasing anything; they're not engaged in any of the events or conversion activities that you have set, so that could affect your overall rankings too, so that's something that I always recommend companies shy away from, but if you are doing that and you are using your website to answer customer questions and do that kind of thing, it's one of those it needs to be excluded from your reporting at the very least. That's filters in reporting and a brief discussion and overview of those.

Advanced Provider : Christopher Pittman 3 Lessons · 13m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese

Course Description

Google analytics has been the industry standard for website data monitoring platforms for decades. This course will cover Advanced topics and explore many of the new features of Google Analytics 4, including how filters work in Google Analytics 4. These lessons provide an in-depth overview of the options available for filtering data including how to use metrics and dimensions as filters in Google analytics. These options build on the built-in filters such as the IP and developer filters. There are also options to use standard filters within reports instead of using them to apply to all traffic.

What You'll Learn

Apply filters to data in Google Analytics 4
Explain the differences between active and testing filters
Create custom filters using metrics and dimensions
Configure account-level filters and standard filters within reports
Recognize the requirements and risks related to filters
Use built-in filters such as IP and developer filters

Key Takeaways

Google Analytics has been the industry standard for website data monitoring platforms for decades.
The course covers advanced topics and new features of Google Analytics 4, including how filters work in GA4.
Filtering options include using metrics and dimensions as filters, building on built-in filters such as the IP and developer filters.
Standard filters can be used within reports instead of being applied to all traffic.
The course explains the differences between active and testing filters and how to create custom filters.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this course cover?

It covers advanced Google Analytics topics and new features of Google Analytics 4, including how filters work, how to use metrics and dimensions as filters, built-in filters such as IP and developer filters, and using standard filters within reports.

What will I learn to do with filters?

You will learn how to apply filters, understand the use of filters, explain the differences between active and testing filters, create custom filters, and understand the requirements and risks related to filters.

What topics are included in the lessons?

The lessons cover Filters, Account-Level Filters, and Screen Data and AB Testing.

What skills does this course focus on?

It focuses on Analytics, Content Filtering, Filter Graph, Google Analytics, IP Filter, and Web Filtering.