Filtering your Google Analytics data

Google Analytics filters allow you to filter out unwanted data from your Google Analytics reports. Examples of traffic that you might want to filter include crawler spam and your home/business IP address.

Crawler spam or bots are not real website visitors but electronic bots that artificially increase the number of sessions and decrease average time per session on your website. You might see these crawler bots listed as semalt.com, free-share-buttons.com, Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com.

Using IP address filtering, you can filter out traffic to your website that is generated by you or your staff, you ensure that you are only tracking potential customers. IP address filtering is useful if you have a static IP address for your home or business.

If you are confident that all of your potential customers will come from a specific country or region, as is often the case for local businesses, you can create a filter to report on traffic from your target region only.

Before you start filtering

You should create a copy of your original (unfiltered) Google Analytics view before you add any filters so that you can compare the filtered and unfiltered results. To do this, select ADMIN from the Google Analytics navigation menu, click on the current view listed under the VIEW column, and then select “create new view” to create a new view called “filtered”. Google recommends that you always maintain an unfiltered view of your data. If you are not sure about how to use filtering functions, please contact us for advice. You can also view instructions about filters provided by Google.

Filter crawler spam

To add filters to your account, select ADMIN , and then ALL FILTERS under the ACCOUNT column. Select “+ Filter”.

To add a crawler spam filter, fill in the following information:

Filter name: Crawler spam
Filter type: Custom
Select Exclude
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: (best|100dollars|success|top1)\-seo|(videos|buttons)\-for|anticrawler|^scripted\.|\-gratis|semalt|forum69|7makemoney|sharebutton|ranksonic|sitevaluation|dailyrank|vitaly|video\-|profit\.xyz|rankings\-|dbutton|\-crew|uptime(bot|check)

IP address filtering

To add filters to your account, select ADMIN , and then ALL FILTERS under the ACCOUNT column. Select “+ Filter”. If you know your IP address, you can filter your IP address using an IP address filter:

Filter Name: My IP
Filter Type: Predefined
Select Filter Type: Exclude
Select source or destination: Traffic from the IP addresses
Select Expression: That are equal to
IP address: type in your IP address, e.g., 123.456.789.10

To find out your current public IP address you can type “what’s my IP address” into Google or visit What's My IP Address.

IP address filtering is most effective if you have a static (or fixed) IP address. If you have a dynamic IP address, your public IP address will change periodically and you will need to update your IP address filter to reflect your new IP address. If you are not sure what type of IP address you have, compare your public IP address before and after resetting (or unplugging) your modem. If your IP address changes after you reset the modem, then you have dynamic IP address. (Note that, if you have a dynamic IP address, your internet service provider can change your public IP address remotely.)

Filter by region

To add filters to your account, select ADMIN , and then ALL FILTERS under the ACCOUNT column. Select “+ Filter”.

To filter by country:

Filter Name: North America
Filter Type: Custom > Include
Filter Field: Country
Filter Pattern: United States|Canada

To filter by city:

Filter Name: <Insert desired city name>
Filter Type: Custom > Include
Filter Field: City
Filter Pattern: <Insert desired city name>

You can also exclude specific regions by selecting the filter type "exlude" rather than include.

Using Google Analytics

IP address tracking