Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools that you will use in digital marketing. One of the things that makes it so capable is the level of customization that it offers. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to use it either. There is a lot that you can do beyond the standard reports and functionalities that you get with GA - and we are going to discuss some of them next.
Filters are how you control the data visible in a report. Any SEO expert would tell you that filters are one of the most effective ways of utilizing your Google Analytics data. You have 2 types of filters in GA – predefined filters and custom filters.
Google Analytics gives you a set of predefined filters. As the name suggests, these are easy to set up and do not require any SEO expert knowledge. The 3 sets of choices in these predefined filters that you can use to create 32 combinations for filtering are:
Exclude, include
IP Addresses, ISP Domain, hostname, subdirectories
that contains, that begin with, that end with, that is equal to
For instance, you can exclude hostnames that contain a specific word or are equal to a specific value, view data only for specific IP addresses, and so on. With predefined filters, your choices are limited to combinations of the values shown above.
Custom filters offer you more options when compared with the predefined filters. You can create a custom filter to:
● Include or exclude data
● Change data to uppercase or lowercase
● Create a more advanced filter for data modification
● Search and replace
The possibilities with custom filters are endless. The custom filter categories include content & traffic, e-commerce, event, application, social, and users among many others. An SEO expert can use these to create reports that are more meaningful for business owners.
Any god SEO expert should also know that you can create filters both at the Account and at the View level. To create a custom filter at the Account level, go to the Account that you want to create a filter in, under ‘Account’ click on ‘All Filters’, and then click on ‘+ Add Filter’. This button will only be visible to users who have the necessary permissions to create and modify filters. Select ‘Custom’ for creating a custom filter, and from there you can create the filter and apply it to a view from the ‘Available Views’ list. Once you create and apply a filter, it continues to apply itself in a view. Furthermore, you can also create and apply multiple custom filters.
Custom filters are used by SEO experts as well as website owners for various reasons. Custom filters help you to remove redundant data. For instance, people may visit the pages on your website with different capitalization, such as typing /Subscribe.html or /subscribe.html. This would create 2 rows for the same page. You can avoid that by adding a lowercase filter to make all page names lowercase in a report. You can also take care of search terms in the same way using a similar filter.
Custom filters can also help you clean a lot of data in your report, in turn helping the SEO expert easily understand that report. For instance, if you track form submission in a format such as ‘sub_00223’, then you can replace it with something more meaningful using a ‘Find and Replace’ filter in your report. It can be a helpful tool to replace the codes in your report and make them more readable.
SEO experts also use custom filters for removing the ‘/’ at the end of your URL, to remove the parameters of a query, and to make views and reports more meaningful and user-friendly.
The attribute that you apply a filter to - the HostName, Source/Medium, City, etc. is a dimension. Just like filters, there are predefined and custom dimensions in GA, which is what we will discuss next.
A good SEO expert will be able to tell you that Google Analytics gives you 2 types of dimensions - default, and custom. Default dimensions are those that are already included in the reports. These are User Dimensions (User Type, Days since the last session, etc), Traffic Sources (Source, Keyword, Campaign, etc), Goal Conversions, and so on.
Custom dimensions are user-created. These are used to measure characteristics that are not already measured by one of the default dimensions. Custom dimensions allow you to import data that GA does not collect automatically and correlate it with GA data. An SEO expert can help you figure out what custom dimensions are relevant to your goals, and how you can track them.
To create a custom dimension, login to your Google Analytics account, and go to the property that you want to add a custom dimension to. Under the ‘Property’ column, go to ‘Custom Definitions’ and then to ‘Custom Dimensions’. Click on ‘New Custom Dimension’, add a name, choose the scope, and select the ‘Active’ checkbox to start collecting data under this dimension and add it to your report. You can leave it unchecked if you want the dimension to remain inactive for now. Click on ‘Create’ once done.
An SEO expert uses custom dimensions to track data that is not tracked by default. For instance, suppose you have a content-based website with contributions from multiple authors. You can create a custom dimension to track the number of individual visitors each author receives.
Custom dimensions allow you to include non-standard data in your Analytics reports, such as CRM attributes. You can also create custom dimensions for measuring the conversion time of a visitor. SEO experts use such custom dimensions to analyze the time taken to convert a user from a visitor to a customer or a subscriber. Custom dimensions can teach you a lot about user engagement and demographics.
Dimensions make up one-half of a report - the other half is the metrics involved. Consider a sample of a report that contains the number of visitors to your website from different cities. The City here is your dimension, while the Number of Visitors in this report is the Metric. A metric is a quantitative measurement in your report. Similar to dimensions, you can have custom metrics too, which is what we will discuss next.
Custom Metrics enable the SEO expert to track unique interactions that Google Analytics does not track automatically. To set up custom metrics, you need to go to the ‘Property’ column and then ‘Custom Definitions’--> ‘Custom Metrics’. Click on the ‘New Custom Metric’ button here, enter the required details, select the ‘Active’ checkbox if you want to start using the metric right away, and click on ‘Create’ to complete the setup.
Both custom dimensions and metrics require modification of the tracking code, but this is something that an SEO expert or developer can help you with.