Filters 101: How they make your analytics reporting efficient - and your business more profitable

There are standard report settings within every analytics solution that can segment website traffic.  New visitors versus returning visitors is an example. But there are times where a setting has to be tailored to text related to a visit.  This is where filters come into play.

The skinny: Filtering limits reporting to specific kind of traffic in which you know you would or would not consider. The benefit is a more efficient reporting. Filters should be planned to that they compliment a specific strategy, layout, and traffic trends. For example, a filter can be set so that reports show activity that occurs on a certain set of subdirectories.

Just about every web analytics solution provides a filter capability. Because it focuses on text, filters can assist in narrowing the data in a variety of different situations.

• Filters can help gather text shared across a number of domains.
• Filters can include or exclude IP addresses (or a range of address) - A possible usage can be eliminating site visits by employees, keeping the data more accurate. It can also be used to interpret data across
• Filters can be set by geography
• Filters can also reflect segments of data - referrer, client browser settings, page titles, etc. - this can be handy for a segments which reflect a persona of a target market.

Filters aid your business operations by narrowing the reporting scope on the activities that relate to your business. This saves time in developing strategic solutions based on the data reported.

Analytics solutions like Google Analytics provide filtering capability